Suzy Spence is a contemporary American painter based in New York City and Vermont. Spence occupies a singular space within the medium of painting. Her constructed portraits and fictitious worlds draw on hunting traditions from British sporting art, time-based drips and gestures associated with the New York School, and canonical references ranging from Francisco Goya to Paula Rego. Narrative hovers in the work, but it’s offered only as a possibility. Her recent research into the physical properties of oil paint, after decades of working exclusively in water-based mediums, has opened a new chromatic field. The results are sensuous and complex, marked by depth and texture. Color combinations seem to borrow their logic from processes foreign to painting proper—printed fashion photography and performative image culture—yielding something akin to alchemical transformation. She takes these elements as a point of departure, using them to uncover the latent potential of the painted surface.

Her most recent exhibitions include Sears Peyton New York, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson, WY; The Frame presented by Oleg Guerrand-Hermès, New York City; Wave Pattern, curated by Dylan Brant and Max Werner, New York City; Sara’s, New York City; Arusha Gallery, Somerset, England; Hurst Contemporary, London, England; Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn New York and Sears-Peyton Los Angeles, CA. She completed her undergraduate degree at Parsons School of Design in New York and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She attended residencies at Skowhegan and the Vermont Studio Center. Reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Paper Magazine, Frieze, Artnet, Artcritical, Two Coats of Paint, The Brooklyn Rail, The Portland Press Herald, Art New England and other publications.

Spence’s work is in private and public collections, including the collection of The New York Foundation for the Arts; MHKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium; the Grazer Kunstverein, Graz Austria; Glarner Kunstverein, Glarus, Switzerland; The Zillman Museum at The University of Maine and the New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA), the archives of Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts Co., held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library, in addition to numerous private collections.