Suzanne Caporael: Fitting — Suzanne Caporael

Suzanne Caporael’s tenth solo exhibition with the Miles McEnery Gallery, Fitting, demonstrates an ongoing interest in the visual manifestation of theoretical concepts. In this series, using the four-color theorem of cartography, the artist fits polyomino shapes into one another. Tertiary colors describe their adjacency and boundaries within the image as a whole. These shapes serve as an organizational syntax, forming a constructive proof that explores the tension between rigid systems and the fluidity of perception.

As these polyominoes interlock and tessellate across the canvas, their boundary edges are softened by Caporael’s signature paint handling; the multiple semi-opaque layers merge to create a uniquely textured surface that recapitulates the receptive nature of the linen beneath.

Susan Tallman, in her essay “NP-Complete,” notes that in addition to mathematical and statistical physics, polyominoes are also used in games. “Games play out in time; paintings play out in space. But the pleasure of a good game move offers isn’t really about the game. It lies in the sudden awareness of an opportunity you hadn’t seen a moment ago, and the chain of new options that unfurl from that realization. The images in Caporael’s paintings are fixed, yet somehow they carry the whiff of that wide open universe of permutational possibility.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated printed catalog with an essay by art historian and author Susan Tallman.

Suzanne Caporael (b. 1949 in New York, NY) received both her Master of Fine Arts and her Bachelor of Arts from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA. In 1986, a Painting Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2020, Caporael was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She has been the subject of notable solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin– Madison, Madison, WI; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA; Peters Projects, Santa Fe, NM; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA.

Caporael has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; de Young Museum and Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and New York Studio School, New York, NY.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT, among others.