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Susanna Heller: Intensive Care

Susanna Heller, Untitled (throne) 2010
pencil on paper
30.48 x 22.86 cm

For decades, Susanna Heller (BFA, NSCAD, 1977) has distilled the peripheral landscapes of New York City in her wildly expressive, near-abstract drawings and paintings. Figures rarely appeared in Heller’s work before March 2010, when her husband was hospitalized with a devastating illness. To cope with the anxiety, during her bedside vigils Heller began to draw her agonized, silent husband and his setting. In her catalogue essay, Karen Wilkin compares the new drawings with Heller’s urban paintings, “The passive figure isolated on the bed, the complicated surroundings of the life-sustaining hospital equipment, the glimpses of an iconic view of the city outside the window all become, spatially and pictorially, elements in a ‘landscape that we recognize from her urban images, with their elastic space and fractured viewpoints.” The foreshortened perspectives, nervous line and festoons of cumbersome medical apparatus reflect the trauma experienced by patient and caregiver.

ARTIST’S TALK & RECEPTION Join us on Saturday, 25 February, from 2-4pm for Susanna Heller’s artist’s talk, followed by a reception for Intensive Care.

Purchase the catalogue

Susanna Heller: Intensive Care 2012
Foreword by Ingird Jenkner, Essay by Karen Wilkin, artist's biography, 24 pp., 14 colour illustrations, $15.00

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