SUZANNE CAPORAEL: TIDE WATERS
April 29 - July 2, 2004

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to present Suzanne Caporael: Tide Waters, on display from April 29 - July 2, 2004. Suzanne Caporael's (b. 1949) work can be found in such prestigious public collections as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As has come to be expected with works by Suzanne Caporael, this group of oil paintings stems from her interest in the natural world around her. The titles in this series allude to geographical locations and these works in particular are named after estuaries, the point where rivers flow into the ocean. The genesis of these paintings is a complex and varied natural phenomenon, to which she brings her own particularly scientific approach; the implied grid system and multicolored amorphous forms suggest data gleaned from such varying sources as text, scientific data, and documentary photographs. As Grace Glueck stated in The New York Times, "...you might say that if natural laws were to express themselves through paint, something akin to her work could result."

The works in this exhibition are spare and elemental and the color palette used, ranging from pale violets to bright greens, is not one usually associated with nature. Caporael's method for the placement of color within the works is consistent throughout the series: she assigns a color to descriptive words in her source book, Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe. The resulting patterns have a vibrancy and luminosity that simultaneously recede and emerge from the background as a tidal river to the sea.