Ortuzar Projects - New York - November 20, 2019-January 25, 2020

Ortuzar Projects is pleased to present NEWS!, Suzanne Jackson’s first solo exhibition in New York. In a career spanning more than five decades, Jackson has worked experimentally across genres including drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, poetry, dance, and theater and costume design. The exhibition follows Jackson’s recent career retrospective at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, and primarily focuses on her painterly abstractions, including a group of large-scale, semi-sculptural works freed from any external support.

Built up in layers of pure acrylic, Jackson’s colossal “anti-canvases” are partially structured with netting, rods, and paper fragments, and strewn with cast-off color and other prosaic elements: peanut shells, bamboo, bells, loquat seeds, leather string. The artist’s handmade gestural impressions—pinching, crimping, and pleating—occur within a material transparency that lends each composition a uniquely lyrical and luminous dimensionality.

Jackson’s process further develops methods and techniques explored in acrylic washes in the early 1960s in a more figurative idiom. Her constellations of bodies, birds, botanical and marine life have since exploded the spatial constraints of the flat canvas to embrace the architectural scale of the gallery. Strongly rhythmic expressionist motifs recur across and reverberate through densely layered topological surfaces—as informed by balletic choreography and the drapery of the proscenium stage set as any history of Western painting. On Jackson’s aesthetic and intellectual independence, art historian Kellie Jones has remarked: “In the tradition of black migrant women before her, she . . . remade the West in her own image. It was a specter of freedom, evincing ‘female self-invention,’ . . . [and] a threat to the patriarchal order.”

For more information, please visit Ortuzar Projects