March 23 - April 22, 2018
Susan Hensel – "Eros and Thanatos"
Paintings
Main Gallery
Opening Reception for the Artists
Fourth Friday, March 23, 2018
6:00-9:00 pm
(Artist performance during the opening)
Free and Open to the Public
Artist Statement
The artwork in the Eros and Thanatos series is elemental, like the first handprints on the cave walls. The images are beautiful: oval, floral, undersea, vulvar: evocative of birth, life, pleasure.
The artwork is a consideration of beauty while still acknowledging vulnerability, pain and brokenness. Death will always arrive for each and every one of us. It is the subtext of all that we do and the source of the rapturous awareness of the divine, the immanent, the beautiful.
Beginning with instinct and sensory data, ending in nothingness, with beauty and pain in between...
A hallmark of my studio practice is to work for extended periods of time with a single idea. From June 2015 to January 2017, I worked exclusively with shell-like vulvar images in multiple media, comparing and contrasting the vulvar shapes with aquatic life forms. Wall hung, framed and unframed pastels, drawings, prints, paintings, lace, sound and performance are employed to create a multisensory experience of the beauty and breadth of living.
Biography
Susan Hensel received her BFA from University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics.
With a history, to date, of over 200 exhibitions, 32 of them solo, twenty garnering awards, Hensel's desire is to communicate stories through art.
Hensel's artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Duke University Special Collections with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts and University of Colorado at Boulder.
In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Ragdale Foundation.
Hensel's curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery. Hensel has curated over seventy exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.
More at www.susanhenselprojects.com/
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