Susan Crile

Susan Crile (born 1942) is an American painter and printmaker. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions, and her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum,^[1] the Phillips Collection, and the Cleveland Museum of Art,^[2] among others.

Crile was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She is currently a professor at Hunter College in New York City. Crile has also taught at Princeton and New York University.

Works

According to the biography at Stewart & Stewart (see External links), "Crile is noted for her disturbing and evocative abstracts. Vaguely geometric, planetary and aeronautical shapes and patterns are rendered in thin veils of saturated color often used in eccentric combinations." Many of Crile's abstractions are based on study of oriental rugs and other patterned textiles, somewhat recalling the textile-inspired patternings in the work of Matisse. The art also evokes ceramic pattern designs, as well as natural patternings such as those seen on snake skins. Crile seems to gravitate toward patterns that have been gradually yielded up, so to speak, from the earth - whether in the form of ancient human textile traditions or of reptilian scale coverings. These motifs and colors have a resonance that goes far beyond mere geometric abstraction.

Crile has also shown a fascination with the aerial view in art. Author Margret Dreikausen (pp. 23–27), discussing Crile's earlier, map-like aerial landscape paintings, writes that "Susan Crile's landscapes may be perceived as abstract paintings, more pattern than image, broken up by line and color" (p. 25).

Other creations are politically charged, such as recent work based on images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Many of these images are faceless and rendered in reddish or grayish mud tones and textures, suggestive of clay, slate, or dust (or perhaps the color is, as the New York Times commented, "fecal brown"). The victims themselves are outlined in ghostly white chalk, becoming, in the words of the New York Times review, "spectral icons of martyrdom."

See also

• Aerial landscape
• Protest art

References

• Dreikausen, Margret, "Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art" (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London, England; Mississauga, Ontario: 1985) ISBN 0-87982-040-3
• Frank, Elizabeth; Susan Crile; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland). Susan Crile, recent paintings : an exhibition (Cleveland, Ohio: The Center, 1984) OCLC 11441511

External links

• Askart.com pages on Susan Crile
• Susancrile.com
• COLOR IMAGES of Crile's work, with a biography, at webpage of dealer Stewart & Stewart (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan)
• New York Times review of Susan Crile's Abu Ghraib work, "Abuse of Power" (review by Andrea K. Scott)