SUZANNE CAPORAEL: GOING
October 10 – November 15, 2008

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Suzanne Caporael: GOING, an exhibition of the artist's newest paintings.

Driven by her desire to "keep, hold, safe, savor" the things and places she experienced on her most recent road trip – of which, "there have been hundreds in my life," Caporael says – the artist turned to a medium readily available on the road: the New York Times. Caporael bought the newspaper daily and, using the brightly colored advertisements folded in the center, she cut the ads into smaller, malleable shapes of solid color, divorcing them from the logos and slogans they carried. Armed with a palette of Tiffany blue, Starbucks green and Verizon red, Caporael constructed what she terms her "dry paintings" – essentially unglued collages. By assembling and re-assembling the colored shapes, sometimes reusing the same shape in multiple compositions, Caporael composed a visual journal of her memories. Once back in her New York studio, the artist painted full-scale paintings based upon her collages.

Caporael is interested in how we see; that is, how the brain processes visual information. Each viewer brings a unique set of experiences, memories and recollections to her work. This is Caporael's raison d'être. So, while the GOING paintings are largely abstract, it is possible to discern recognizable elements. The artist explains: "A great part of seeing is the individual's personal mental vocabulary of things seen. So it is a large part of what you bring to it. It is not a code to be decoded; rather, each painting is a group of components meant to be assembled by the viewer."

Suzanne Caporael was born in Brooklyn, New York. She obtained her MFA and BFA from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

GOING consists of twenty-eight oil on linen paintings, all created in 2007-2008 and ranging in size from 22 x 28 to 60 x 90 inches. A full-color catalogue including an interview with the artist and essay by Lisa Lee is available in both hardcover and paperback.