Suzanne Caporael

Suzanne Caporael: Prints

Tandem Press Apex Gallery, 1743 Commercial Avenue. May 4-July 14 (extended); reception: Friday, May 4, 2018; 5-9 pm.

press release: Tandem Press is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Suzanne Caporael: Printsat the Tandem Press Apex Gallery. Featuring a selection of original fine art prints by Suzanne Caporael created at Tandem Press between 1997 and 2016.

This exhibition will provide a view of Suzanne Caporael’s extensive career throughout which she has drawn inspiration from the physical world - the landscape, bodies of water, elements of pigments, melting ice, etc. Often created in series, Suzanne Caporael’s images are characterized by simple compositions, blurred edges, and sensuous color palettes.

A few years ago, Suzanne Caporael hit a patch of ice while driving on a rural road. As the car raced down a steep hill, she “saw” the landscape slowing dragging across her vision, as though her eyes were trying to hold her in place with the car continued its slide. The memory of that visual anomaly led her through a thicket of books and essays on the subject of visual cognition. Neuroscientists, magicians, artists, and art historians, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists, have all contributed to the literature on the eye-brain connection.

The eye is the device, and the brain interprets. Vision has its own peculiar language of cues, some straightforward and some more subtle. In her prints, Caporael grapples with these cues, and with the way in which time and cultural reference affect how we see what we see.

Exploring the different pathways to seeing has led Caporael to soften her earlier formalistic practice, and the result is a full-blown stylistic disparity well suited to each of her subjects. Confidently moving between the dynamic and the serene, Caporael approaches her work with flexibility, dexterity, elegance, and a scholastic rigor that had categorized each series in her 40-year career.

Suzanne Caporael was born in the United States in 1949. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Open since January 2018, the Tandem Press Apex gallery has been made possible through the generosity of Apex Property Management who donated the space and Paula and David Kraemer who funded the renovation of the space.

The reception for this exhibition coincides with MMoCA’s Spring Gallery Night and a concert in the Tandem Press Jazz Series. This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the Brittingham Fund.