Suzanne Caporael: Littoral Drift

Solo exhibition

Artemis · Greenberg Van Doren · Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Caporael. The exhibition will be on view January 9 – February 15, 2003. This is the artist’s first full-scale exhibition in New York in five years. A fully illustrated color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Suzanne Caporael’s new abstract paintings are inspired by the book Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe. An estuary is the wide lower course of a river into which tides flow and the book is a treatise on the language descriptive of this increasingly vanishing landscape. Like the book, Caporael’s paintings occupy a territory that vacillates from the literal to the metaphorical: the vernacular language (of painting) as history and poetry. The artist condenses her visual vocabulary into small forms of varying hues arranged across broad planes of subdued color. Further grounding the paintings are their titles, which name the places that inspired them. In the painting 374 (Fukui Estuary, Japan), horizontal bands of light yellow, purple, and grey are stacked against a pale green ground, suggestive of a receding riverbank in profile.

Suzanne Caporael was born in 1949 in Brooklyn, NY, and currently lives and works in Stone Ridge, NY. She has exhibited widely in galleries and museums nationwide and her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Carnegie Institute, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.