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FULL CRY
BY SUZY SPENCE -
“I’ve gotten to the point where I have full command of my medium,
I have full command of my subject.”
- Spence
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“Full Cry” alludes to the sound the hounds make when they are energetic and following the scent - the sign of a good hunt. This poignant title acts as a double entendre, describing not only the moment before a final triumph but also the collective emotional state that permeates our interpretations of art at this time.
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Mining society portraiture, political imagery, equestrian sporting paintings, and contemporary fashion photography, Spence evokes an air of female defiance and haughty sensitivities that feel alive and ghostly all at once. A sea of fresh female faces stare directly into the eyes of the viewer, intimating intense individuality and a sense of another time and place, while also of the immediate now. Inky streaks of deep black build intimate portraits of unknown women: powerful, raw, and dressed to the nines, with the playful symbology of whips and tall boots. These females are armed with sultry stares of near military strength.
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Spence’s intimate knowledge of the garb of the foxhunt comes from her participation in “drags”, a foxhunt only in name which uses the scent of foxes instead of the living creatures. The camp comes out of her interest in feminism and its heroines, and her will to subvert the traditionally male-dominated images of landed gentry and their equine companions that famously appear in British boardroom art.
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"In either event, theatricality is today more than ever implicated in paintings of women by women as both the gazed upon and the spectator have become equally active players. The multiplicity and subtlety of treatments, of which we had a glimpse through these two shows, sparkles hopeful excitement for the continual evolution of painting’s capacity to give voice to a muted presentness: to comply, to masquerade, to entice, or to attack."
- Wen Tao on Suzy Spence for artcritical, 2018
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Spence grew up splitting time between Manhattan and rural Maine, the daughter of a painter connected to the world of Maine-based art luminaries Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd. She completed a residency at Skowhegan, received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Spence came of age in a wildly turbulent and exciting time to be a painter. The nineties marked a distinct transition from work that was socially motivated and conceptual to an art world that championed painting and painters. The current art world dominated by the art fair was still in its infancy. In the nineties, Spence worked as a curatorial assistant under Marsha Tucker at the New Museum, and in 1996, she was given her first exhibition at Colin de Land’s American Fine Art Co., an institution of change in its own right. Suzy Spence’s work has been covered by The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Esquire Magazine, Paper Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Independent. She has received fellowships and awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and Skowhegan School of Painting and Architecture.
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RECENT PRESS
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