Susanna Heller Solo Exhibition 2020 :Olga Korper Gallery

Susanna Heller

February 15, 2020 – March 21, 2020

Olga Korper Gallery is proud to present new works by Susanna Heller, Brooklyn-based painter of cityscapes and master of pathetic fallacy. The exhibition opens Saturday February 15th and will remain on view until Saturday, March 21st. The opening will take place from 2-5pm on Saturday February 15th.

Heller’s process is intense and precise. She walks every day up and down the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan wildly sketching the urban landscape. Influenced by the works of Paterson Ewen and J. W. Turner, Heller’s paintings focus on space and movement, offering a constant sense of motion on the canvas. Through her application of unexpected colour and thickly layered paint – plus anything else she can find, a torn-up palette or an errant rubber glove – Heller’s work brings clarity to the energy, smells and sounds of the city; perspectives are distorted, and cranes sweep across the sky as though holding up the clouds.

Heller’s paintings encapsulate entire cityscapes – buildings crowded together below massive weather systems shifting and changing, full of energy and in perpetual turmoil – the eye of a rumbling storm – reflecting the emotional, psychological, and physical journey of the artist. Already living with a fractured spine, Heller painted through another year of complex health issues affecting her vision, her balance and reaching the limits of her tolerance for pain. Heller’s studio was her sanctuary and rehab in one. Struggling to focus her vision Heller painted eyes into her skylines, flying overhead, omnipresent in their observation of the city below, seeing what she cannot. The lines crisscrossing and circumnavigating the limits of the canvas start to look more and more like organs. All the guts of the city, spilling forth. But all the glory, too.