Image: Milton Gas Station, from the Brown Joint Portico 1/24/19, 2019, oil on panel, 6 x 9 inches
Susanna Coffey is perhaps best known for her self-portraits that explore identity, guise and the examination of the self. However, concurrent with this pursuit has been Coffey’s interest in landscape painting and particularly the landscape at night. Working on an intimate scale (most of them are around 6 x 8 inches) Coffey captures the beautiful shapes and colors that are “revealed” in darkness.
Inspired by a painting in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, Jean-Francois Millet’s Starry Night (ca. 1850-65), Coffey’s first attempts were executed in the countryside of Vermont. She would go on to include urban scenes of Chicago (where she taught at the School of the Art Institute for many years), New York City (where she maintains a studio), suburban Connecticut, and wherever her travels took her. Natural and artificial light sources serve as reference points – moonlight on a field or a brightly illuminated gas station seen through a thicket, for example. But these paintings are not so much about place as they are about meeting the challenge to recalibrate perception, to coax out the world from darkness and, in Coffey’s own words to “paint a landscape that has no green trees.”
In April 2019 Susanna Coffey: Night Paintings was published by MAB Books with an essay by publisher Brice Brown. Brown suggests that in these works “Coffey is imploring the viewer to hold strong, be present in the moment, and try to revel in the strange, confusing, powerful thing that is life.” And Coffey herself states that “the paintings are watching life, and in some way, prolonging it, holding onto it, transforming it so it stays a little longer.” These powerful and enchanting paintings are life experiences, small enough to hold in your hand.
Susanna Coffey’s work is included in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hood Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Karamay Museum of Art, Xinjian, China, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain, among many others.
This is her fifth solo exhibition at Alpha Gallery.
