Suzanne McClelland

AddressFrontAddressBack

2018
19 x 16 inches
Edition of 500, Space Sisters Press for Suzanne Mcclelland
http://www.suzannemcclelland.net

< Artists + Writers

Suzanne McClelland born 1959, lives and works in New York

“In the 1980s, when I first came to New York, works by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were on view a lot and were important to me. One reason their works were so powerful is that at that time they inserted themselves into the local New York world of macho expressive painting. I was interested in how you could take physical material and let it function in a way a voice would—as speech rather than disembodied text. I also like to isolate a single word, because that single word doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t instruct you, it’s not a narrative, it’s not even creating an image necessarily. I didn’t want to name things either, which was the way in which Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Cy Twombly positioned themselves with language. I wanted my paintings to be more about the combination of thought and feeling that I saw in Kruger’s and Holzer’s work. That’s how it started, and since then, there’s always been something to make a painting about.”

– Suzanne McClelland, Artforum, 2017