Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/64173/riffing-off-symmetry-a-conversation-with-susanna-coffey/
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Susanna Coffey.
Asked about the variety of subject matter in her work Coffey comments: "I am just moving through the range of genres – still life, figuration, and landscape... Most artists follow their work wherever it leads. They follow their muse or their duende... I’m like the most traditional person in the world, and I am really interested in the genres! I like that connection to the past that the traditional genres provide. People are moving away from tradition and the weight of history, and I’d rather bear that weight and feel it. Even though everything has been done, it hasn’t been done by me. And particularly for women artists, it is not a very long tradition. The culture in the United States is also not that old. So I don’t want to throw it off; I want to get engaged with history, and fight with it, and compete with it."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/60858/from-life-a-group-exhibition-organized-with-marshall-price-steven-harvey-fine-art-projects/
John Yau reviews the exhibition From Life at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, organized with Marshall Price, on view through December 23, 2012.
Yau writes that the show presents "11 paintings by artists committed to working from observation. Chronologically, the artists span five decades (or generations), with Lois Dodd and Lennart Anderson, born respectively in 1927 and 1928, being the oldest. The youngest include Gideon Bok, Anna Hostvedt, Sangram Majumdar and Cindy Tower, with Bok and Tower born in the 1960s, and Hostevedt and Majumdar born in the 1970s. The other artists are Susanna Coffey, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were born between 1938 and 1949. Together, these artists — a number of whom have been influential teachers — suggest that observational painting is a vigorous, various, and imaginative enterprise that continues to fly under the radar."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2012/08/susanna-coffey-studio-preview-alpha.html
Elisabeth Condon visits the studio of painter Susanna Coffey and blogs a photo preview of Coffey's paintings for an upcoming exhibition at Alpha Gallery in Boston.
Condon writes that Coffey's "paintings have changed radically, while retaining salient characteristics such as cropped portrait size, large scale seen close-to, subtle, but exciting color transitions and a 'knit-painting' mark that is a cross between a horizontal dab and flick of the brush. The paintings are on cradled panel, but the overall effect of the facture is a soft density, built layer upon layer to achieve a rich earthiness."
Link to Post:
http://cityarts.info/2012/04/03/from-self-to-city/
John Goodrich reviews the exhibition Susanna Coffey: Nocturnes at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through April 22, 2012.
This show, Goodrich writes, "concentrates on another, little-known facet of [Coffey's] work: the tiny, nocturnal cityscapes and landscapes—rarely larger than 8 inches across—that the artist has been producing for at least 15 years now. Like the self-portraits, they convince in plastic terms: trees, buildings and streets settle believably into their own spaces. Painted invariably in a single session, their looser, brushier strokes evince a greater urgency of technique."
