Suzy Spence: Like Racing Smoke

Suzy Spence: Like Racing Smoke
March 3 – April 16, 2022

New York, NY – Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present Like Racing Smoke, an exhibition of new works by artist Suzy Spence. This is the second solo exhibition of Spence’s work with Sears-Peyton in New York. The exhibition will feature works on paper, paintings, and hand painted silk screen wallpaper made by the artist.

Critic and Art Historian Elizabeth Buhe discerns the development of Spence's work over the past three years in her catalog essay Like the Way Art Always Was. "Spence’s work is distinctly American, descending from the terrestrial northeastern expanses of Milton Avery, the character studies of Marsden Hartley or Walt Kuhn, and the magical forests and skyscapes of Charles Burchfield or Helen Torr. This owes as well to Spence’s participation in drag hunting in rural Vermont, where she also isolated during the pandemic. At a literal loss, like many, in the wake of this life-altering year, Spence’s title Like Racing Smoke quotes a verse by queer British poet Siegfried Sassoon that describes the moment of life’s extinguishment on the battlefields of World War I. Alongside these circumstances of the past two years, Spence paints with a confidence that manifests as a formal and conceptual openness matched by her newly lyrical hand. Paint drips, sometimes sideways; brushwork legible as such bespeaks artifice, like that of the sartorial glamor and social convention her genres engage; forms are rendered provisionally, unclosed, like the evanescing top hat in Pink Smoke (2020), or iteratively, like that rider’s doubled boot and arm.”

Suzy Spence (b. 1969) grew up on Mount Desert Island in Maine before attending Smith College and Parsons School of Design. She was a Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Spence had her first solo exhibition in 1998 at Colin De Land’s, American Fine Arts, a gallery at the intersection of art, fashion and performance whose archives are held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library. Spence is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery (New York and L.A.), Tayloe Piggot (Jackson Hole, WY), and she is a frequent exhibitor with Cathouse Proper (Brooklyn). Her work has received critical praise in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Paper Magazine, Artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She lives and works in New York City and Vermont.

Suzy Spence: Like Racing Smoke is on view March 3 – April 16, 2022 at Sears-Peyton Gallery’s Chelsea location at 210 Eleventh Avenue. Exhibition hours are 11am-5pm Tuesday-Saturday. For more information or to request further press images, please contact the gallery.