
Weil’s work is on view alongside sculpture by Kiki Smith and photography by Candida Höferpart in a group show of women artists who approach their work in relation to science, history and literature.
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 a painter, printmaker and book artist. She 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.
Notable exhibitions of Weil’s work include Frontiers Reimagined at the 56th Venice Biennale; Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Movement at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany; and Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, which premiered in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and then traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. In 2015 her work was also on view at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in poemumbles: 30 years of Susan Weil’s poems/images. In 2017 it was included in Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work was included in James Joyce: Shut Your Eyes and See at the Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, New York; and in Our Own Work, Our Own Way, at The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2020. Weil’s work is currently on view in the traveling exhibition A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time organized by the U.S. governmental organization Art in Embassies.
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’artiste and poetry.
Susan Weil lives and works in New York.
Athens, Greece, Acropolis Museum, May 25 – June 4, 2023
Lisbon, Portugal, June 5 – 10, 2023
Geneva, Switzerland, June 29 – July 4, 2023
Washington, D.C., Smithsonian’s National Museum of American HIstory, September 19, 2023
Pictured: Susan Weil, Triangle Hand, 2015, digital print on paper mounted on Sintra, 23.75 x 18.875 inches.
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Weil’s work is on view alongside sculpture by Kiki Smith and photography by Candida Höferpart in a group show of women artists who approach their work in relation to science, history and literature.
Susan Weil’s work is on view in the exhibition Photography and the Surreal Imagination.
Susan Weil’s work is on view in the exhibition Question Everything! The Women of Black Mountain College.
Susan Weil's work is on view in Intersections in American Art.
A collaborative work by Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg is on view.
Susan Weil's work is currently on view in Once in a Blue Moon at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle. The exhibition comprises seminal works from 1989 to the present.
Susan Weil's work is currently on view in Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Movement, an exhibition at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Germany that celebrates work by the Bauhaus artists who left Europe after it closed in 1933 and came to America to carry forward their ideas and influence a new generation of American artists.
We are pleased to announce that gallery artist Susan Weil is featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends.
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We are pleased to announce that gallery artist Susan Weil will be featured in Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College, the first in-depth exhibition of the history of photography at the storied institution. Her work will be featured alongside photographs by Josef Albers, Hazel Larsen Archer, Josef Breitenbach, Harry Callahan, Trude Guermonprez, Robert Haas, Clemens Kalischer, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Andy Oates, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly, Stan VanDerBeek and Jonathan Williams.
The exhibition coincides with a series of workshops, talks and screenings, the details of which can be found here: http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/exhibitions/
Congratulations to STG artist Susan Weil, whose work is part of the group exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957 at the UCLA Hammer Museum, which was named one of the top ten museum shows of the year in the LA orbit by art critic Christopher Knight. He writes: “For a generation of young artists flanking World War II, tiny Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina would become the prime incubator of America’s avant-garde culture.”
Veteran STG artist Susan Weil’s work is on view in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957. The traveling exhibition debuted at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art before moving to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Its final stop is the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. This is the first comprehensive museum show to focus on the history of the college, which became a crucial incubator for future giants of the mid-century avant-garde.