SUSAN WEIL
Body Shelley, 2014, digital image on backlit Plexiglas and canvas on Sintra board, 77 x 55.5 x 2 inches/195.6 x 141 x 5.1 cm
Jones Beach, 2014, digital image on canvas and Sintra board, 30 x 72 x 2.5 inches/76.2 x 182.9 x 6.4 cm
Susan Weil is fascinated by the relationship between seeing and knowing, and how to represent time, motion and language. She often fractures the picture plane in her work, deconstructing and reconstructing images using a range of materials including collage, blueprint, and paint on recycled canvas, acrylic and wood.
Coming of age the centre of the New York School with its eclectic cultural influences and interdisciplinary experimentation, Weil studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Her peers included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. But unlike her contemporaries, Weil has never been afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, drawing inspiration from nature, literature, photographs and her personal history, embracing serious and playful elements in her work.
Over the years, she cultivated strong interests in the great modern Irish author James Joyce, the Persian poet Rumi, and the pioneering English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Weil also studied in Paris and has exhibited in Sweden and Germany. Otherwise, however, she says, “I don’t travel a lot, but I travel in my mind.” She concludes: “I stand on a Susan spot. The world and the art world shift and change around me. I also deepen and build. It is a special perspective to watch this double cycling.”
Weil is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Helsinki City Art Museum; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía , Madrid. In 2010, Skira Editore published Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, a comprehensive monograph documenting her large and diverse body of art, livres d’artistes and poetry.
Thirty years of Susan Weil’s poems and drawings were on view at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina, in the first half of 2015.
Born in New York in 1930 | Lives and works in New York