Remedy
September 13 – November 1, 2008
Woodward Gallery
Woodward Gallery is proud to open the Fall Art Season with Susan Breen: Remedy.
Susan Breen’s Remedy explores our contemporary sense of social, psychological, and physical maladies by imagining the transformation of various ‘ailments,’ to a visual representation of what might, in theory, relieve that state of being.
Having radically expanded her palette from earlier monochromatic oils with this current series’ richly colorful tones, Breen’s paintings examine heartache, fear of flight, insomnia, political disillusionment, hiccups, delusions of grandeur, and other afflictions, through the eye of abstract imagery.
The majority of Breen’s compositions are grounded in symmetry, having derived broadly from Mandalic symbology. Breen’s interests in botany, physics, Eastern philosophy and medicine complicate notions of easy, logical order and balance. This combination has helped Breen’s work to possess both a seeming openness of form, and an absolute rigor in execution.
Remedy expresses possibility and hope where neither comes too freely. In this remarkable series, the notion of affliction is simply a kind of potential existing in a latent, raw state. It lives beneath each panel, on which the patterned and abstract restorative power of Breen’s stunning palette and conceptual sense of game is rendered with force and great beauty.
