The Menil Collection Hosts Suzan Frecon

Monday, 25 February 2008 22:14

HOUSTON, TEXAS - Known for the intriguing geometry and the poetry of her work, Suzan Frecon, and Menil director Josef Helfenstein, have chosen a selection of recent oil paintings and watercolors for form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting . The exhibition will be on view from March 7 through May 11.  Consisting of 10 oil paintings and approximately 30 watercolors, dating from the late 1990s to 2007, form, color, illumination  features works that have not previously been exhibited in a museum. From Houston, the show will travel to the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland.

Throughout her career Frecon has dedicated herself to the process of painting. Through precisely interrelated compositions of color, form, and the material of paint, she produces works of art that resonate on a philosophical level.

Frecon grew up in rural Pennsylvania. After receiving a degree from Penn State University, she moved to France where she continued her work and attended the Universite de Strasbourg and L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts. In Europe she had the opportunity to observe and discover the nature of painting first-hand by looking at paintings in museums, rather than looking only at reproductions, as had been the case in her art-history classes. Though she has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s, her abstract paintings first gained recognition abroad. Her first collaboration with Helfenstein took place after he had begun his curatorial career in Bern.

In recent years the long-standing European interest in her work has translated to America, where Frecon was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. "She is an extraordinarily interesting and serious painter -- a stabilizing force in today's fast-moving and commercially driven art world," said Helfenstein. "Her painting seems almost like an existential way of being an artist -- painting as a form of knowledge. It's very modern, yet deeply rooted in human history." In her work Frecon means first and foremost to raise the viewer’s consciousness. Incorporating the rectangular structure of the canvas, Frecon’s oil paintings are unusually large-scale geometric compositions, often executed in earth reds; her palette also includes varying tones of green, blue, indigo, and occasionally gold leaf. An emphasis on visual properties of the paint itself also identifies her work, in which Frecon often sets up a play of shiny and matte surfaces, which impart negative and positive (i.e., dark and light) readings of the paint areas in the compositions, depending on the changes of natural light.

Frecon's watercolors, including red structural study (2007) and blue split orb, orange ground (2006), are more relaxed in shape and lighter in tone. Although more gestural than her oil paintings, the artist’s watercolors are no less disciplined, including those on weathered Indian ledger paper and Japanese handmade paper. Though Frecon’s compositional elements may sometimes be described as allusive, in both mediums, color and form are never referential. form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting  will be accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue, including an interview with the artist by Helfenstein and essays by Ulrich Loock, deputy director of the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal; Matthias Frehner, director of Kunstmuseum Bern; Larry Rinder, dean of graduate studies at the California College of the Arts; and Sarah Eckhardt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois. From Houston, the exhibition will travel to Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, where it will be on view from June 11 to September 28, 2008.

Visit www.menil.org The Menil Collection, located within Houston’s Museum District, is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission and parking are free.