Susanna Coffey
Since 2001

Philip Guston conveyed an anxiety felt by many artists living through politically troubled times: “… [w]hen the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world.  What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” 

Susanna Coffey is a painter for whom the studio drama — constant adjustments between what is literally seen and what is felt to be right for a painting—is a microcosm of “a bigger picture.”  For her, the crises at the canvas are not formal, in the way described by Guston, so much as empirical: the existential tension is between a need for authenticity (realness) and an awareness of the inherent artifice of her process at every level, from pictorial conception to painterly application.

Television, from which indirectly her background imagery is often culled, is an inevitable cultural association of these compositions, with their fraught relationship of figure and ground. Coffey’s visage becomes for us a trusty communicator, like a familiar anchorwoman such as Christiane Amanpour of CNN.  But invariably, hungry as the medium is for live action, the image is a static backdrop and the animation is in the face or body of the reporter—word trumps image.  These paintings, similarly, are hungry for the bigger picture but must make do with the real presence, the witness, the reporter.  Sometimes, Coffey succeeds in shriveling up to a ghostly, diminutive element you need to look closely to discover: once discovered, her head pivots the image.  She becomes like the self-images Raphael or Carravaggio inserted into bigger dramas—[the School of Athens, the Martyrdom of St. Matthew]—looking out, beyond the picture plane, to engage the viewer directly. 

David Cohen
Gallery Director

Susanna Coffey and the New York Studio School wish to extend special thanks to the private lenders without whose generosity this show would not have been possible.  In addition, we are grateful to Lisa Wainwright for her essay and Cyrus Cassells for his poem, to Bill Maynes for his video on the artist, and to Lawrence Sunden for his design of the printed catalogue, announcement card and gallery signage.  Thanks are also extended to the directors of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which represents the artist, for their help in various ways.  As ever, thanks are due to the School’s trusty crew of student workers, led by Ruth McKerrell, for their work on the exhibition, and to Hadley Nunes for her work on this site.

All photography at nyss.org/coffey by Steven Bates except #16
Tom Van Eynde: Moss Glen Camouflage Oh Show See .