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 art, and contemporary fashion photography. In her sweeping, intrepid brushstrokes and controlled drips, Spence conjures an air of defiance in her figures that feel alive and ghostly all at once.
Whether she is painting the details of a rider’s sartorial glamour, or stepping back to capture an empyrean sky that threatens to swallow up the pastoral hillsides where the farmland and hunt territory are barely perceptible, Spence’s work is charged with visual, historical, and theatrical dynamism as she explores both the intimate and nuanced, as well as the more traditionally rendered moments of equestrian life. She relishes in the rich painting opportunities she finds in the graphics and color of racer’s silk uniforms, subtle emotion in her portraiture, the equine and the female figure in moments of pure athleticism, or verdant, teeming landscapes inspired by her Vermont surroundings.
While Spence’s work implicitly comments on tropes of femininity, class, and camp, these works equally present the equestrian lifestyle in earnest. Though her entry into equestrian painting was initially spurred by flipping through Town & Country magazines while at Skowhegan in 1996 and tinged with irony as a young artist in New York City, Spence now spends the majority of her time in Vermont where horse riding and agriculture is abundant. Spence has immersed herself in that community and found a legion of equestrians who serve as genuine and continuous inspiration for her work as she subverts the traditionally male-dominated images of the landed gentry that appear in British boardroom art. Deeply informed by her background in fashion, Spence fantastically renders heroines and their steads that are as earnest as they are culturally charged.
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.