Pickpocket (2013, oil on canvas, 20×24”)
Review by Rebecca M. Alvin
Upon entering the Duffy Gallery at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), I was hit with a storm of vibrant colors popping out of canvases by Susan Been that utilize a range of media from straight up oils to mixed media collage paintings.
Although thematically grouped into eight categories—history, children and family, self-portraits, feminist pop collage, conflict and drama, metaphors, “scene-scapes,” and the Apocalypse— this exhibition of some 35 paintings feels quite cohesive, with themes shared across those groupings.
The work spans more than 40 years of Bee’s work and through that time range reveals continuous concerns with power dynamics, conflict, and isolation portrayed with a sense of humor and a bold optimism underlying them, even as the subject matter itself can be dark (e.g. Framing the Rosenbergs, 1983). Perhaps it is the vivid color palette, the surrealistic imagery that features unusually complicated trees with unusual elements in their limbs, and otherworldly figures in paintings such as Eye of the Storm (2007), Treehouse (2022), and Apocalypse II (2022). Or maybe it’s the clear infatuation with the natural environment in a piece like Go Forth (2011), evoking the Brooklyn-based artist’s connection to Provincetown, where she has been coming since childhood. The collective result of these independent canvases is one of both intensity and openness, so that you want to spend time in the gallery with them, absorbing the energies they exude.
The exhibition is curated by Johanna Drucker, who writes “[Bee’s] canvases are filled with these suggestive images, embedded in chains of substitutions and allusions that lead us from their apparent form into imaginative realms. The result is that her imagery escapes the narrow designations of figurative or representational art.” And certainly, the symbolism and metaphor in the pieces are striking, but there’s also something about the kinetic energy in the way she paints that is equally engaging to experience. An image like Pow! (2014) just grabs you at the pre-conscious level before you start thinking about the subject matter, a woman punching a man in a boxing ring and what that might say about power dynamics, gender, and violence. Likewise, the tender gesture in Pickpocket (2013) is what pulls the viewer into the story and ideas being conveyed in this image of two people trying to embrace through the bars that separate them.
One of several striking exhibitions at PAAM currently, Susan Bee’s show has to be seen in person, as it is the collection of large colorful canvases with distinct ideas and compelling imagery taken in as a whole show that magnifies the impact each one could have individually.
Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm Selected Works, 1981-2023is on view at PAAM, 460 Commercial St., through November 17. For more information call 508.487.1750 or visit paam.org.
All images courtesy of PAAM
