Susan splitt denver1/6/2024 House after house after house, and no people in sight to distract us. Throughout all of it, she remains focused on her objective, and she helps viewers stay focused by leaving out the presence of humans. These pieces have the feel of dollhouses, and extend her suggestions about how we see from single, ordinary chairs and rooms to entire pieces of architecture. She makes bronze reliefs that capture cut-aways of multistory houses so that you can see inside bedrooms, parlors, garages and pool rooms. She makes straightforward oil paintings of dining chairs, and bedroom scenes that are constructed from wood and acrylic paint covered in resin. Whatever they are - and I challenge everyone to decide when they view them - they make us reconsider how we see both art and real life.Ĭooper does this experimenting in other forms. Or, it might be said, she is making sculptures of paintings. She is essentially making paintings out of painted wood. They take three-dimensional objects and squeeze them as they move toward the horizon, so that we can discern foreground from background.Ĭooper does the same squeezing with these furniture pieces, but in sculptural form. This, of course, is the way that painters - going back to classical Greece - render perspective in flat works. Things contract as they get farther into the distance. The front of a chair may be large and the back smaller. Instead, she presents them as our eyes might capture them from a distance shortened, stunted, angled. But she doesn’t flesh out all of those dimensions. Technically, they are three-dimensional - they have fronts and sides and backs. Cooper renders them in combinations of acrylic and oil paint, wood, resin, bronze and more.Įach piece challenges our relationship with the physical objects around us and highlights the perspectives from which we see them, and with Cooper’s pieces, those can be endless.įor her best works, she creates mini-rooms, domestic dioramas with basic chairs and tables, that are part painting, part sculpture. Her work is familiar for many reasons here: She has created a number of highly visible public art pieces at civic buildings produced shows at Denver’s respected William Havu Gallery and created scores of artworks in various media, including the vibrant collages that lead her current exhibit, “Rearranging,” at the Curtis Center for the Arts in Greenwood Village.īut her chairs, also part of this show, deserve special attention, along with her beds, desks, tables, lamps, window frames and other everyday bits of architecture. (Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post)Ĭolorado artist Susan Cooper has always had a lot of fun in this particular artist’s playground. Susan Cooper’s studies of an ordinary chair. We expect nothing from them and so presenting a chair enables the artist to take the focus off what we are looking at and turn it to how we see it, or how we might see it differently.Īrtists such as David Hockney, whose work is currently breaking records at global auctions, have built careers around the exercise. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close MenuĪrtists paint and sculpt chairs because they are a universal starting point for seeing, a place to play with perspective, shape and color.
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