Like many women of her generation, Weil's work and career were overshadowed by the men around her, many of them boldface names in the canon of art history. But as the narrative of modern and contemporary art is slowly being rewritten to include more women, it is well past time to shine a brighter light on the art-historical significance of Weil's prodigious and wildly creative oeuvre.
"Susan Weil was the first artist I signed when I opened my gallery in New York in 2000. She was the first of a number of unsung women from the New York school I've represented over the past 23 years. Great work is great work. I started the gallery to challenge the notion that Western men make the most collectible art. That hasn't changed. It is my privilege to bring her work to ever wider audiences," says Sundaram Tagore.
About the artist
Susan Weil (b. 1930, New York), whose work is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, is among the key female figures who pushed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism. Weil studied at the Acadėmie Julian in Paris and under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the rural mecca for young artists, composers and choreographers where she often scoured campus rubbish dumps with Robert Rauschenberg looking for unexpected materials to incorporate in their experimental works.
Weil moved to New York in 1949 with Rauschenberg, to whom she was briefly married, when the art scene was erupting. She came of age at the center of the New York School, with its eclectic cultural influences and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her peers included Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns as well as Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Weil was a notable figure among this group of artist-pioneers whose experimentation with unusual materials and techniques would later influence artists across the globe. When she introduced Rauschenberg to the blueprint technique, which she used to create life-size cyanotypes of human figures and foliage, it had an indelible impact on his practice.
Although Weil was active in New York during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, she was not afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, gaining inspiration from nature, literature, photographs and her personal history. Throughout her long career she has consistently brought to life intangible qualities of time and movement, creating multi-dimensional works in which she fractures the picture plane, deconstructing and reconstructing images. She also consistently experiments with materials from everyday life, including found objects, metal, paper, Plexiglas, repurposed textiles, recycled canvas and wood. The dynamic and playful results are crumpled, cut and refigured compositions that invite viewers to contemplate multiple perspectives at once. Over the years, she cultivated strong interests in James Joyce, Rumi, and the pioneering English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Poetry and literature have always been an integral part of her practice.
Weil is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art and The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The J. Paul Getty Museum, California; the Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; Lyric Kabinett, Munich; National Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge; and the New York Public Library, The Spencer Collection, New York, among others.
In 2010, Skira Editore published Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, a comprehensive monograph documenting her large and diverse body of art, livres d’artistes and poetry.
