Artist: Susan Wick
Organized by: Gildar Gallery, Denver and Lulu, Mexico City
Venue: Vacation Gallery, New York, US
Date: November 4 – 28, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Gildar Gallery, Denver and Lulu, Mexico City and Vacation Gallery, New York
Gildar gallery, Denver and Lulu, Mexico City are pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Denver-based artist Susan Wick. For her first solo in New York, the self-taught painter Wick will present a selection of paintings and drawings. The imagery in her works is the direct product of her own personal, highly developed idiosyncratic pictorial and symbolic language. Their subject matter is as informed by her vivid imagination and interpretation of reality as it is by current events (Vietnam or, say, the 2001 Afghanistan War). Brightly hued depictions of women or figures of indeterminate gender are garbed in quasi shamanistic raiment, masks or face paint. The flat, fluid, seemingly organic or vegetal forms that populate her grounds occupy the same thematic space as the numerous birds that seem to either peacefully coexist with her figures or accompany them like spirit animals. The density of her compositions, in which several paintings are liable to exist side by side, is enhanced by the riotous vibrancy of her palette. If the formal simplicity of her figuration brings to mind the work of Dorothy Iannone, one also senses a life no less richly lived. Deliberately removed from the centers of artistic production and commerce, Wick has allowed herself to experiment and pursue a practice uninhibited by the pressures of a conventional career, producing a rich and coherent body of work which demands to be engaged with, much like her life, on its own terms.
—
Susan Wick (b. 1938, Madison, Wisconsin) is an artist living and working in Denver, Colorado. As part of the 1970’s San Francisco based performance collective Baker/Rappaport/Wick, she exhibited at the California State University, Los Angeles, University Art Museum, Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, Musee Des Beaux Arts Laussane, Switzerland and the Bologna Biennial among others. As a solo artist she had a one-person exhibition at the DeSaisset Art Museum, Santa Clara, California (1981) thereafter moving to Denver, Colorado where she continued to work in relative isolation from the broader art world, periodically exhibiting in local exhibitions, until recently. In 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver named Wick “Colorado Artist of the Year” and presented a solo exhibition of her work. In 2015, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art presented a 50 year-survey of the artist’s work.
