Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhibition: Suzan Frecon: Paintings, to be held at Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster Street.
This exhibition will feature large scale paintings from 2002 to 2005.
Suzan Frecon's paintings have strong associations with the past. The pigments that she uses include rusty earth reds, seen in some of the earliest known art in the caves at Lascaux, and lapis blues, reserved from the early Renaissance period for the mantle of the Virgin. There is a reference to architectural forms and labyrinthine structures in her open geometric abstractions, but for Frecon both the colors and the compositions are non-referential.
Frecon prepares her own earth tones, mixing the paint on a marble slab with a glass pestle. Using precise measurements of oil and pigment she modulates the surface paint from matte to lustrous, creating a balance of reflective and dark areas which react with the changing natural light. The paintings are executed flat, then left to dry leaving a burnished veneer. Frecon sometimes favors diptychs that are horizontally placed, thus inserting a straight edge often between two crescent shaped compositions. The surfaces of Frecon's paintings are not intended to be perfect. They show irregularities in the paint surface, pin holes from the point of a compass and lines that are not mechanically drawn but appear to have been plotted slowly by hand and eye.
Suzan Frecon was born in 1941 in Mexico, Pennsylvania. She lives and works in New York City. She studied at Penn State University from 1959 to 1963, the Universität Strasbourg in 1962 and Ecole Superieure de Beaux Arts, Paris from 1963 to 1966. Her museum shows include: Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland in 1986, Matrix/Berkeley, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, in 1989 and 1995, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland in 1994, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York and The Drawing Center, New York in 2002.
This is the first exhibition for Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum Gallery.