American artist Susan Weil revisits familiar themes and subject matter with a brand-new series of three-dimensional mixed-media works that combine figurative illustration and photography with explorations of time, movement and space.

Through her crumpled, cut, and reconfigured compositions, incorporating wood veneer, painted Plexiglas, and various collage materials, Weil deconstructs and reconstructs images and sets figures in motion, forcing the viewer to contemplate numerous perspectives at once. In her skilled hands, the result isn’t dissonance and chaos but a harmonious sense of fluid movement. Her dynamic assemblages hover between the abstract and concrete, and between painting and sculpture.

Susan Weil has been at the epicenter of the New York art world since the 1950s. She came of age as an artist in the postwar period, studying under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College alongside Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. An innovative and influential member of the New York school, Weil embraces serious and playful elements in her work, and unlike her contemporaries, she has never been afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, unabashedly drawing inspiration from nature, literature, photography, and her personal history.

Weil is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in the collections of 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; the National Museum, Stockholm; Helsinki City Art Museum; and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Image: © Susan Weil, Sundaram Tagore Gallery