PORTAL DRAWINGS
Suzanne Blank Redstone
August 17th – September 29th, 2019
@
Freddy
Harris, NY
It’s 1966, Autumn. I’ve recently returned to New York following an enlightening senior year in Rome on Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honours Program. I’ve set up a studio in the basement of my father's dental office in Bayside, Queens.
I’m lonely and confronted with myself. What questions am I asking? What answers begin to reveal where I am going?
By day I have a job as assistant Registrar at the American Federation of Arts in Manhattan; at night I escape to my basement studio, 2 blocks away from home. There, underground, fluorescent strip lights, working in the finished knotty pine basement listening to jazz, my dog at my feet.
So I start by asking myself ‘How can I go forward? I need discipline. What is discipline?’
Inspired by Josef Albers’ ‘Despite Straight Lines’ (1961) – I begin to create lines and areas on graph paper, which transform the two-dimensional surface. I pull out structures from the initial drawing. There are numerous possibilities. I am excited to develop these constructions, steadily pushing further, taking me in and out through and around space.
The process is everything. Creating a structure, learning what that structure is, working with it and resolving that particular experience through a series of drawings often culminating in a ‘Portal Painting’
These drawings (over 400 in all) represented a crucial stage in my early development. They were stored unseen in that same Bayside basement along with the Portal Paintings for over 40 years before being shipped to our farm in England.
In September 1968, I left New York for Philadelphia to pursue an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania School of Art and Architecture. I had a teaching fellowship with Robert Engman, a pupil of Josef Albers. In 1970 after marrying a Brit, I left the United States for England and have been living and working for most of that time on our farm in the countryside of Devon. Drawing remains a central part of my practice, which has for many years focused on creating three dimensional structures that collect and reveal light.
Suzanne Blank Redstone (b. 1945, Orlando FL) has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. For the past fifty years, Redstone has maintained a rigorous artistic practice without the support of dealer representation. She joined the roster of Jessica Silverman Gallery, which hosted her first American solo exhibition in September 2016. Redstone's work was included in the 2018 Victoria Miro Gallery exhibition "Surface Work" and also featured in the Stephen Friedman Gallery booth at Frieze Masters 2018. Redstone is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco and lives and works in Devon, England.
Freddy would like to thank Jessica Silverman Gallery for making this exhibition possible.
The exhibition is on view by appointment only. For more information (including exact location) and images, please contact info@freddygallery.biz
