Susan Sills “Head-On”

Viridian Artists, Inc.

[Image: Jan Van Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Marriage Life Size Cut-outs" Oil paint on ½ inch birch plywood

This event has ended.

Viridian Artists presents an exhibition of outstanding art by Susan Sills.

Susan Sills’ life-size freestanding wood cut-outs of characters from Old Master paintings are a whimsical restructuring of art history. By releasing the familiar images from the confinement of the frame and thrusting them into real space, the paintings confront the contemporary viewer in new and surprising ways that invariably provoke not only smiles, but also fresh insights.

Continuing a project she started over 40 years ago, her sculptures explore the magic of encountering familiar personages from Art History in a totally new context. Millet’s “The Gleaners“, Seurat’s couple from “A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte”, and Chagall’s “Fiddler“ all somehow change when they enter our contemporary rooms, the size and volume of normal human beings.

With a jigsaw she carefully cuts fine birch plywood to shape, and then re-creates in oil paints the original artist’s technique, be it the heavy impasto of Van Gogh or the subtle glazes of Ingres. Rendered life-size regardless of the size of the original, they relate not only to us, but also to each other.

“As with all of Sills’ delightful post pop takes of familiar figures from art history, encountering them out of context, blown up to life size, is like spotting one’s favorite movie stars on the street. No other artist has done so quite as thoroughly or taken the concept of the cutout quite so far into previously unexplored territory as Susan Sills.” Ed McCormick, Gallery and Studio.

Sills has had 19 solo shows including at the Queens College Art Center and at the Pensacola Museum of Art, which sponsored an educational experience for 4,500 children and their teachers. Her work is included in the Sylvia Sleigh Collection of Women Artists at Rowan University, and she is a featured artist in “100 New York Painters“ by Cynthia Dantzic. Her 2D sculptures have also been used as a set for a dance performance at the Whitney Museum.