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Tandem Press
Suzanne Caporael: The Violet Gaze
Suzanne Caporael: The Violet Gaze
Years ago, Suzanne Caporael hit a patch of ice while driving on a rural road. As the car raced down a steep hill, she “saw” the landscape slowly dragging across her vision, as though her eyes were trying to hold her in place while the car continued its slide. The memory of that visual anomaly led her through a thicket of books and essays on the subject of visual cognition and has had a lasting impact on her as an artist.
Suzanne Caporael: The Violet Gaze pulls together a selection of prints, spanning the last twenty years, from several series of Caporael’s work. Rooted in abstraction, her images flirt with representation to various extents, and this exhibition shows several points along that scale. While showing a range in the content of Caporael’s work, these pieces are united by a signature color palette marked with varying shades of violet and a striking orange-red. The colors used by Caporael in her prints feel at once both unstable, as if they are subtly stirring and could possibly fade into another hue, and highly specific. There is an urgency to each color in her compositions, individually and as they relate to each other. The colors are arresting, but not demanding, as if trying to hold us still just as Caporael’s gaze tried to fix her motion mid-slide in her car.
Image Credit:
Suzanne Caporael, Origins of the Elements
Everything important is invisible.
-Suzanne Caporael (Blue Uniform exhibition catalog, Miles McEnery Gallery)
Suzanne Caporael working in the Tandem Press Studio with Master Printer Jason Ruhl. Image courtesy of Tandem Press.
Suzanne Caporael's key for the Origins of the Elements. Image courtesy of Tandem Press.
Suzanne Caporael's preparatory drawing for View from Lion's Head. Image courtesy of Tandem Press.
Suzanne Caporael (b. 1949) was born in New York. The artist’s father, a civil engineer, moved the family around the United States until they settled in California in the mid-1960s. Caporael earned her BA and MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She has been a visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009, she was an artist-in-residence at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others. She was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020.
