Susie Rosmarin
Some New Paintings

Talley Dunn Gallery
September 14 – October 26, 2013

With her exhibition Some New Paintings, Susie Rosmarin presents two impressive series of her mind-bending grids and precise lines that offer new chapters in the artist’s recognized oeuvre of mesmerizing visual play.  The repeated geometric shapes and intense color within Rosmarin’s works offer stunning fields that appear to flutter and vibrate, achieving the illusory effects of Op-Art forebears Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely.

In the early 1980s, Rosmarin began to translate her appreciation for mathematical patterns and numerical equations into visual form, constructing patterns of bright colors and repeated grid forms.  As Rosmarin once described her process: “I make preparatory sketches because I have to be very precise in my layout. I alternate layers of paint and tape to put down bands of color, and then apply more paint and more tape. Lines are a very important part of abstract painting.”

With tremendous attention to detail and meticulous control, the artist renders seemingly perfect lines and shapes, all by her own hand, as she applies layer after layer of acrylic paint onto the masked surfaces of her canvases.  A new series of paintings offers an interplay of black and white rectangles as they appear to swell and warp over a field of subdued grey.  Another body of smaller paintings, each twenty by twenty inches, present grids of nine squares that pulsate in fantastical color, suggesting cross-like patterns that underlie the compositions.