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SUZY SPENCE
BREAK MAIDEN -
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.
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Break Maiden, Spence’s third exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, presents twenty-four paintings that were created both at her studio in Vermont and while at a residency at The Old Silk Barn in Bruton, England, including the more monumental Racetrack (2023-2024). 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, the subtle emotion of the equine and rider in moments of pure athleticism, or verdant, teeming landscapes inspired by her Vermont surroundings. This exhibition includes a new series of paintings of horses’ muscular hind quarters, which were inspired by looking at The Horse Fair (1852-1855) by Rosa Bonheur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In what she described as “a breakthrough moment,’ Spence found painters’ joy in the realism that came naturally in rendering the sumptuous butts of horses with muted beiges on black paper, and later, on black gessoed panel and canvas. These paintings demonstrate Spence’s mastery of her media and the joy she finds in her sensual, intuitive process.
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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. The result of this transition in Spence’s life is a body of paintings of heroines with their mounts that are as earnest as they are culturally charged. Many of the works of Break Maiden present particularly tender moments between young women and their horses, as one figure gently melts into another, and a wealth of emotion is evident in her subjects’ gently rendered expressions as well as in the loose strokes and soft tones of the more abstract fields of the works. Spence finds a metaphor for her practice in these riders in their risk-taking, in their endurance, and in their moments of rest.
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Suzy Spence was born in 1969 and grew up on the coast of Maine, where her mother, painter Marcia Stremlau, frequently brought her along to sketch the local landscapes. Over time, Spence’s stylistic development was subtly shaped by the figurative idioms of renowned Maine artists such as Marsden Hartley, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd. After studying at Smith College and Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris, the artist attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1996 and received an MFA at The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1998. Spence’s work first received critical attention for a group of drawings presented at The Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles (1997); Paper Magazine, who covered the show, featured Spence on their pages many times thereafter. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Frieze, Artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, and other publications. Solo exhibitions of Spence’s work have taken place at Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts, New York, NY; The Grazer Kuntzverein, Austria; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; NeueHouse, New York, Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn, NY; The Helen Day, Stowe, VT; Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY; Arusha Gallery, London and Bruton, UK; and Sears Peyton Gallery, New York, NY. She has been a frequent exhibitor with David Dixon’s exhibition space Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn (2014 - 2024). Spence’s work can be found in collections throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Her work is included in the archives of Colin De Land American Fine Arts Gallery, held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library. Recently, Collector Oleg Guerrand-Hermes featured Spence in his curatorial project "The Frame" on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (2024). Spence was just the subject of a podcast interview with British art historian Carrie Scott to air in February of 2025. Spence divides her time between New York City and Vermont.
BREAK MAIDEN: SUZY SPENCE
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