Suzy Spence was born in 1969 and grew up on the coast of Maine. She grew up on the coast of Maine, studied at Smith College, Parsons School of Design (New York and Paris), The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. Her equestrian portraits and hunt scenes were first exhibited at The Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 1997, when Colin DeLand of American Fine Arts, Co. decorated one of the hotel’s bedrooms with her work in an early iteration of an international art fair. Her work is in private and public collections worldwide, including the archives of Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts Co., held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library, the collection of The New York Foundation for the Arts, M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium, The Grazer Kunstverein, Graz Austria, the Glarner Kunstverein, Glarus, Switzerland, The Zillman Museum at The University of Maine, and the New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA). Recently, Collector Oleg Guerrand-Hermes featured Spence in his curatorial project "The Frame" on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (2024). Spence lives and works in New York City and Vermont.
Suzy Spence
For the last nearly thirty years, the tradition of equestrian painting has been a fertile field of investigation and play for painter Suzy Spence. Finding artistic and conceptual inspiration in its aesthetics, metaphor, and cultural commentary, Spence creates paintings that touch on 18th-century society portraiture, political imagery, equestrian sporting paintings, and contemporary fashion photography. In her sweeping, intrepid brushstrokes, Spence conjures an air of female defiance and haughty sensitivities that feel alive and ghostly all at once.