PAST EXHIBITION
Fransisca Sutil: Resonance
May 9, 2007—June 17, 2007

Press Release

Francisa Sutil’s new paintings will be exhibited at the Nohra Haime Gallery from
May 9th through June 17th 2007.   On view will be impressive examples from the RESONANCE series and the untitled body of works preceding these paintings which as a group comprise some of Sutil’s most compelling statements to date concerning color and the effects of its beauty, magic and mystery.  One of today’s gifted interpreters of the Minimalism who is expanding our understanding of primary structures, Sutil has evolved over the course of the last three decades a tremendously rich vision of abstraction.  Since the late 1990s when she began focusing on a geometric vocabulary of vertical bands and horizontal striations of color, and experimenting with the physicality of the picture’s surface, ground and support through combining pigmented gesso and oil and mounting linen on wood, Sutil has shown how paintings at a first glance that might appear “reductive” offer unending interest both in terms of the outstanding formal features they possess and the deep reservoir of ideas and feelings they allow us to tap into.  

This is indeed the case for the paintings that shall be installed in a special display designed to showcase their superb construction and the unique contemplative experience these remarkable luminous objects make possible.  Ranging from squares just under two feet to rectangles of unusual lengths and proportions like the 15½ inches high RESONANCE No. 3 which stretches across more than 12 feet of wall, whether of single or multiple panels, the paintings with their

glowing reds, yellows, blues, greens and blacks , do, as befitting the series title, carry tremendous “resonance”.    The emphasis on what Sutil terms “inner movement” brings out the importance of
rhythm and placement in the arrangement of hues.  By repeating a color and grouping chromatic variations of it in contiguous sequences, the artist is inviting viewers to see a grouping of say reds and yellows openly not in terms of any specific given meaning, as she did in the earlier TRANSMUTATIONS paintings shown at the gallery in 2003 but afresh and in terms of the deeply personal, that which is known through the screen of their own experiences and perspectives on art and life.

The RESONANCE SERIES was shown in a major retrospective exhibition covering 25 years of Sutil’s career held at the Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, in 2006.  

Born in Chile in 1952, Sutil moved to New York in 1977 where she completed her studies of art at the Parsons School of Design, the Whitney Museum of Art Seminar program and with the M.F.A. she received from the Pratt Institute in 1981.  Since the 1970s Sutil has exhibited widely in Chile and in New York and other major art centers in the United States and Europe.  She has received numerous grants and awards including a Fellowship from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and an NEA grant from the Drawing Center (Paper Conservation), New York.  In 2000 she was commissioned to do a series of twelve paintings for a private chapel in Santiago de Chile.

Sutil’s work is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Jack Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin; the Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York and Santiago; O.C. P., Paris, France; Reader’s Digest, New York; World Bank, Washington, D.C.; IBM, Santiago; SSC & B Lintas, New York; and the Xerox Corporation, Stamford, Connecticut, among others.

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