Susan Weil

This exhibition marks the first time the US painter Susan Weil, b. 1930, presents her work at Galerie RüdigerSchöttle. The artist studied at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, together with Willem and Elainede Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Despite her abstract expressionist style,the artist, unlike her male counterparts, never let herself be influenced by the prevailing tendencies of thetime. An important member of the New York School of Art, Susan Weil refuses to be categorized in any onestyle, and despite being influenced by abstract expressionism, she never completely forgot about the powerof the figurative.
The exhibition Once In A Blue Moon comprises seminal works from 1989 to the present. Taking familiarobjects as a starting point, Susan Weil reduces all elements to their intrinsic nature to then reconstruct themin unexpected ensembles. Her work Wandering Chairs, a cooperation with her son Christoph Rauschenberg,consists of two chairs and the artist’s portrait, assembled like a puzzle from our different pieces. The viewer’ssearching eye is first captured by the entire picture full of movement and disruption. Gradually, one is willingto engage in the artist’s game, constructing with her a new world in which the objects find each other inunanticipated ways.
The composition of her works is always poetic, dynamic, and playful; it often seems as though the worksdance on the walls. Weil translates her precise observations and detailed perception of life into the vividlanguage of art. This is reflected in playful components such as those in the work Mind’s Sky. This work wasalready shown in 1989 in an exhibition curated by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann in what was then the StaatsgalerieModerner Kunst in Munich. In the freely assembled collage, the depiction of the birds is lofty and to the point,as if it were a vague memory of a dream.
Susan Weil is a Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her works are included inthe Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum London, J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the Helsinki Art Museum.
(S.Sokolov)

Susan Weil
Wandering Chairs, 1998
silver gelatin print
113 x 302 cm
© S. Weil and C. Rauschenberg