NEW YORK, NY.- Marianne Boesky Gallery announced representation of the critically acclaimed artist Suzanne McClelland. In large-scale canvases as well as collaborative books and prints, McClelland has opened new avenues for painting, exploring its visual, linguistic and acoustic dimensions in light of broader cultural and political concerns.
To inaugurate the representation of the artist, the gallery will feature a solo presentation of McClelland’s work at Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms, ‘OVR: Miami Beach,’ December 2-6, 2020. In tandem with her presentation at OVR: Miami Beach, works by McClelland will also be installed at the gallery’s reconfigured 509 W 24th Street space in New York. The 509 location has transitioned to create a space for live viewings of works to complement the gallery’s regularly rotating online viewing rooms and virtual art fair presentations, allowing for more intimate experiences in semi private galleries. Viewings at 509 W 24th Street will be by appointment beginning with McClelland’s works in December.
“Suzanne McClelland’s ever-evolving practice has expanded the boundaries of our understanding of how painting and art in general can masterfully communicate nuanced ideas through form, color and language. Her works are compellingly complex, layered with references and fragments of information that speak to both the personal and a deeply embedded interest in the political underpinnings of communication,” said Marianne Boesky. “We are honored by McClelland’s choice to join the gallery and to launch our representation with a virtual solo booth of ambitious paintings at Art Basel Miami along with a related installation of works in our newly configured 509 space.”
McClelland arrived in New York City in the early 1980s. At first working as a photographer, she documented performances at Storefront for Art and Architecture and Nuyorican Poets Cafe, encountering that era’s energetic and socially engaged music, poetry and street-culture scene. Gathering speech, sound and data-driven text, McClelland continues to translate myriad nonvisual sources into visual spaces. Fragments of sound and printed and electronic information convey the materiality of intonation, weight and speed that reside within human communication.
In the act of translation from speech to text and drawing to writing, McClelland privileges the act of listening and the value of the hand-drawn line. Her work celebrates language that comes from our bodies and its direct relationship to physical experience. McClelland parses such issues as the limitations and malleability of communication; the impact technology has on interpreting information; and the mechanics of language. Her works are infused with social commentary, underscoring the way in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its context.
Together, the presentations for Art Basel Miami Beach’s Online Viewing Rooms and the gallery’s 509 live viewing space place new works alongside earlier paintings, creating an overview of the artist’s decades-long career. Throughout, formal sensuality and conceptual matters are inextricably linked. In her recent “Formulas” series, for example, McClelland incorporates mathematical formulas (such as that for the atomic bomb) and those that “quantify” unnameable impulses – for example, our desire for love and companionship based on components of lust, attraction and attachment. In bringing invented formulas to bear on inchoate forces, McClelland questions the mechanisms by which we exchange information through shared code systems.
Suzanne McClelland has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions and presentations at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2017), The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (2013), and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris branch (1992), and has participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials. Among her awards and residencies, McClelland received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Purchase Award (2012), Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2006), and more. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. McClelland currently lives and works in Brooklyn and the tip of Long Island, NY.
