FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Please List
SUSAN SILLS
"FAMILY PORTRAITS"
April 25- May 13 2017
Reception, Saturday, April 29, 4-6 pm
Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings by artist Susan Sills. Opening on April 25, 2017, the exhibit will run through May 13th, with a reception on Saturday, April 29th, from 4-6pm.
After years of focusing on creating painted wooden sculptures of art historical themes and characters, the artist Susan Sills is returning to her first love - drawing, and to themes closer to her heart - her family.
As always, she is inspired by history, but this time she presents a history of her family as she has portrayed them over the years in ink, pencil and paint, working from life and more recently from photographs. Many of the newest portraits are based on family photographs she discovered in a box and recreated as oil paintings in sepia tones on canvas, recapturing a sense of past moments and lost memories. Who is that man in the fedora who resembles Humphrey Bogart? An uncle or a cousin somehow lost from the memories of those family members still living?
Sills' artistic career began early, studying at the Art Students League when she was just 12, surrounded by a family of artists, particularly her mother. Following in her grandfather's steps, who was a jeweler, she is also including jewelry she has created from geometric drawings and doodles saved from phone call jottings over the years.
For the past thirty years Sills has been noted for her life size cutout figures in painted birch plywood portraying famous characters from art history, creating over 100 of them. Over the years she has presented these works in a variety of ways - from life- size cut-outs of famous heads to grandiose tableaus and installations in which famous paintings come to life in our time with coke bottles, empty take-out food trays, etc. presenting these characters with humor & intelligence.
Sills has had 19 Solo shows, and is included in the Sylvia Sleigh Collection of Women Artists at Rowan University. She was also a featured artist in the recently published "100 New York Painters" by Cynthia Dantzic. She has had solo exhibitions at the Queens College Art Center and the Pensacola Museum of Art, which sponsored an educational experience for 4500 children and their teachers and her 2-D sculptures have also been used as a set for a dance performance at the Whitney Museum. Her art is in numerous corporate and museum collections and she has been represented by Viridian since 1979.
Her complete bio can be seen at susansillscutouts.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12- 6 PM. For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistsinc@gmail.com or view the gallery website: www.viridianartists.com