Galeria d’Arte Moderna - Milan - September 15, 2023 - January 14, 2024

The exhibition—the first dedicated to the artist by a European museum institution—offers a glimpse of the research Suzanne Jackson has been carrying out for over fifty years, and retraces the key moments of her career.

Suzanne Jackson is an American artist whose practice embraces a broad field of investigation exploring the potential of painting, nourished by her experiences in dance, theater, and poetry. Her initial figurative production—populated by a pictorial matrix of characters, animals, and references to nature—evolved over the years, progressively approaching abstraction, until reaching the elaboration of a very personal vocabulary in which painting takes on both a sculptural and environmental dimension.

Somethings in the World stems from the idea of presenting the various stages of Jackson’s production by outlining the recurring elements, from her debut to her most recent oeuvre, through a careful selection of the most representative sets of works. The twenty-seven works on display, including iconic pieces, previously unseen works and her most recent production, creates a narrative that accompanies the visitor through the artist’s universe, at the same time triggering comparison and dialogue with the GAM setting and the permanent collection: from the sharp neoclassicism of Canova to the Divisionist paintings of Segantini, Previati, and Pellizza da Volpedo, as well as the extraordinary experiments in light and matter to be found in Medardo Rosso’s sculptures.

In Suzanne Jackson’s intentions, as reiterated in the title of this exhibition, her work must first and foremost render her experience “in” the world and “of” the world. In fact, the artist’s entire career is marked by phases closely related to biographical events, and that flow into one another, continually mixing and blending over the years: a constant interweaving of the private and personal dimension with the artistic and professional sphere, which the show recounts along an exhibition path constructed not chronologically but by associations and correspondences, underlining the links and continuous cross-references between themes, techniques, and languages.

From her dreamlike paintings of the 1970s to the radical experiments of her more recent “anti-canvases,” which go so far as to do away with the need of a support, only to turn into pure color, the exhibition restores the complexity and the evolution of her investigation that has challenged and pushed the limits of paintings toward unexpected scenarios.

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