Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present Susan Weil: Moving in Time Space, the gallery’s fourteenth solo exhibition by the pioneering American artist. The exhibition builds on one of the gallery’s longest-standing artist relationships, which began in 2000.
Now ninety-six, Weil (b. 1930, New York) continues to work in her Brooklyn studio with the curiosity and inventiveness that have defined her practice for more than seven decades. Susan Weil: Moving in Time Space brings this remarkable history into the present, offering a new opportunity to consider an artist whose lifelong investigations of the human body, movement, time, and space have remained resolutely her own.
Coming of age at the center of the New York School with its eclectic cultural influences and interdisciplinary experimentation, Susan Weil studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. But unlike her contemporaries, Weil has never been afraid to pursue figuration and reference reality, drawing inspiration from nature, literature, photographs, and her personal history, embracing both serious and playful elements.
The works in this exhibition range from 1969 to 2026, including five pieces created in the past two years. The fearless experimentation with new techniques and her use of unconventional materials, both of which have been consistent themes throughout her long career, are well represented. Likewise, the themes she has returned to again and again are on display, including nature, the human figure, geometric forms, and blueprints.
But perhaps the most defining feature of Weil’s visual language is her ability to bring to life the intangible qualities of time and movement, creating multidimensional works in which she fractures the picture plane, deconstructing and reconstructing images. It is the thread that connects most every work in her oeuvre. Weil splinters landscapes into multiple rectangular canvases; slices and dices female nudes into myriad breasts, hands, and feet; and sometimes literally sets images in motion, all of which force the viewer to contemplate numerous perspectives at once. In her skilled hands, the result isn’t dissonance and chaos but a playful sense of movement. Her dynamic assemblages hover between the representational and the abstract, and between painting and sculpture.
An untitled painting from 2024 includes the mix of materials for which she is known, including cyanotypes, fabric, and acrylic on canvas, all of which are collaged onto a wide, concave rectangle of Masonite that gently pulls you into her idiosyncratic world. You and Me, 2025, similarly compels viewer participation thanks to a circular mirror that crowns a trio of geometric canvases jigsawed together, firmly inserting your reflected image into her composition. Untitled (Parts Afloat), 2026, is Weil’s most recent exploration of the body, which is not merely fractured but disembodied and draped over separate cubic forms and a canvas laid flat on the floor—a Cubist construction that compels you to move around it in order to reembody the rotund female figure.
“Weil's work first gripped me because it lives in the space between precision and humanity. She brings together rigorous geometry and the unpredictable expressiveness of the human body in a way that feels both intellectual and deeply emotional. Looking at her work, I never feel like the systems overwhelm the person—they reveal something essential about being human,” says Sundaram Tagore.
“I'm also drawn to the way she refuses to be confined by a single medium. Painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, photography, artist’s books—she seemed to follow the idea rather than the discipline. That freedom to move across forms and platforms makes her work feel alive, as though experimentation itself is part of the art.
“What fascinates me most, however, is how she turned movement into a medium. Instead of simply depicting a body, she records its presence and its passage through space. Her layered drawings and body prints capture traces of motion and time and space, making the artwork feel like a record of a lived moment.”
ABOUT SUSAN WEIL
A key female figure of the postwar New York art world, Weil studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College before moving to New York in 1949, where she worked alongside artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning, as well as composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
From her groundbreaking early experiments with blueprint photography—an approach she introduced to Rauschenberg—to her paintings, collages, sculptures, prints, and artist’s books, Weil has consistently challenged conventional boundaries between mediums. While many of her contemporaries embraced pure abstraction, she maintained a commitment to figuration. Poetry and literature, particularly the work of James Joyce, have also remained central to her practice.
Weil’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in major collections including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Moderna Museet. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and continues to live and work in New York.
SUSAN WEIL & SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERY
Sundaram Tagore gallery presented its first solo exhibition of Weil’s work in 2001 at its original location on Greene Street in SoHo. The following year, the gallery placed Reflections—Photo Alternatives, 2002, an artist’s book created by Weil in collaboration with a group of master printers and craftspeople, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an early milestone for both artist and gallery and the beginning of a period of renewed recognition for Weil’s work.
Over the ensuing decades, the gallery has presented Weil’s work to audiences internationally, mounting solo exhibitions in New York, Beverly Hills, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and in 2015 at the Venice Biennale in Frotiers Reimagined. In 2010, the gallery collaborated with Italian publisher Skira Editore to produce Susan Weil: Moving Pictures, a monograph surveying sixty years of the artist’s practice, 1949 to 2009, including her paintings, works on paper, artist’s books, and poetry. It is the definitive document of Weil’s large and diverse body of work to date.
