Suzy Spence is a contemporary American painter based in New York City and Vermont. Spence’s portraits and hunt scenes first debuted at The Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles (1997) when Colin DeLand / American Fine Arts, Co. decorated one of the hotel’s bedroom with her art in an early iteration of an art fair.
Spence grew up on the coast of Maine, was educated at Smith College, Parsons School of Design (New York and Paris), and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
She received an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York and the same year (age 28) she was offered her first solo show at Colin DeLand’s American Fine Arts, Co at 22 Wooster Street where her graduate thesis was part of the exhibition. The show was praised in The New York Times by Grace Glueck ; she went on to have subsequent exhibitions in Europe and the U.S.
Reviews and features on Spence have appeared since in The New Yorker, Paper Magazine, Frieze, Artcritical, Glorious Sport, Two Coats of Paint, Calling All Horse Girls, The Brooklyn Rail, The Portland Press Herald, Art New England, Seven Days, and other publications.
Her work is in private and public collections worldwide, including the archives of Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts Co., held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library, the collection of The New York Foundation for the Arts, M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium, The Grazer Kunstverein, Graz Austria, the Glarner Kunstverein, Glarus, Switzerland, The Zillman Museum at The University of Maine, the collection of Robert Rosenblum, and the New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA).
February 28, 2024
Meet the Painter Who Masterminded the New Ana Mendieta Series Suzy Spence conceived and is consulting on the project starring America Ferrera. Currently in development at Amazon MGM Studios, Produced by Plan B Entertainment, “The project is based on Robert Katz’s book, Naked by the Window, published in 1990. It traces Mendieta’s rise in the New York art scene, and details how her life was cut short when she fell out of the window of her husband Carl Andre’s 34th-floor apartment in 1985. Andre was put on trial for second-degree murder, then acquitted—a verdict that remains controversial today. “ - MIN CHEN
Announcing: Suzy Spence at The Frame, a popup curated by collector Oleg Guerrand Hermes in Chinatown New York City June 2024
“Suzy conveys a wealth of emotion in her equestrian-themed paintings. Touching on 18th-century society portraiture, political imagery, equestrian sporting paintings, and contemporary fashion photography, there is an air of female defiance and haughty sensitivity that feels 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.”
“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.”
-ELIZABETH BUHE PhD. (2022) exhibition catalog essay for “Like Racing Smoke”
“Suzy made paintings in which women on horseback rode fearlessly toward their quarry. Background and foreground, the letter and the page, a continuous fabric of thinking, making, being, doing formed between us."
- AMY RAHN PhD., Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Maine, Art Historiography as Creative Nonfiction Conference paper “Sister is Powerful”, December 2020
“With a pair of monumental heads of female equestrians (each 9 by 12 feet) Suzy Spence extends her explorations of drag hunting into new formal and emotional terrain. Gender, class, sexuality and other existential concerns still permeate the imagery, but the shift in scale catapults her concerns to a new level. Retaining the dashed off bravura of her small studies in Flashe, these billboard-scaled faces engender a sense of cognitive dissonance: at once cool titans and vulnerable mortals, these hunters ride a narrow path between the intimate and the hieratic.”
DAVID COHEN Artcritical Magazine, March 11 2019 Suzy Spence: Death Rider at Cathouse Proper
"Luxuriance is more than a painterly quality in the work of Suzy Spence. It is a symbolic form. Bravura paint handling conveys the very sense of sport that is her motif in images of the hunt. Riders throw themselves with panache into the chase without attendant loss of elegance or control. Their very sweat is decorous in an almost heraldic balance of vitality and poise. There is a corresponding dialectic in Spence’s attitude towards her subject matter. Her catalogue essayist, Amy Rahn, deftly describes the feminist and class critique at the heart of her gender-bending approach while equally acknowledging her personal investment in riding, her participation in the culture that she observes. “The way these paintings slip—between genre and critique of genre, between a love of the sartorial poses of foxhunting and a critique of their masculine power, and between portraiture and figurative painting—give us a glimpse of something dark and rich that hammers the ground between critical thought and sensuous painting.” The full throttle romance of “the drag” (the term for hunting with a substitute fox segues sexily into the fey innocence of Spence’s idealized sorority of latter-day Artemises) speaks to an artist who hunts with the hounds and runs with the hares."
THE LIST: Suzy Spence at Sears-Peyton, January 11, 2018 - David Cohen Editor & Publisher ARTCRITICAL
“Suzy Spence’s three drippy-thick oil black-and white figurative portraits, with their unself-consciously deft and efficient brushwork, would make Wayne Thiebaud proud.”
DANIEL KANY The Portland Herald Tribune ,The 2018 CMCA Biennial is Good and Messy, December 2018