Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present the work of Suzanne Caporael on view at 62 South Glenwood Street June 25th through August 8 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As a painter, Caporael is preoccupied with scientific subject matter, basing her sublime abstract paintings on methodical research of the natural world. Especially interested the passage of time and how it manifests in nature, Caporael attempts to distill universal truths through careful observation of areas of convergence and transformation, like estuaries or rings of trees. As once described in a New York Times review, “you might say that if natural laws were to express themselves through paint, something akin to her work could result.”
Caporael’s shapes feel intensely deliberate and rigorously rendered. Some pieces are reminiscent of vessels, whereas others bring to mind a seascape. The economy of form and evidence of a refined paint application suggests a sense of order that bears contemplation and cerebral discipline yet allows for freedom of interpretation and mood. The shadowy forms communicate something primal and quiet. Caporael’s work hearkens to Jean Arp, who felt that his forms were not abstractions but the introduction or evolution of what he called “concretions.” In the same way Caporael’s work feels natural and inevitable.
The artist earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. She had her first show at thirty-five, when then-Director Paul Schimmel debuted her work at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). She was awarded a National Endowment grant in painting in 1986, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009 she was a guest artist- in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The artist’s prints are published in collaboration with Tandem Press, Madison, WI.
Suzanne Caporael’s work is in the collections of The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others.