Susan Dorothea White Bibliography

White, Kahukiwa, and Hotz in Lively Shows at Montserrat

Three woman artists with strikingly different approaches were featured in separate, yet simultaneous, solo shows at Montserrat Gallery, 584 Broadway, through September 30.

Susan Dorothea White

Susan Dorothea White, an internationally exhibited painter and sculptor from Australia whose work is in the National Gallery, among other prestigious public and private collections, explores the most intimate experiences of her life, as well as more topical subjects, in meticulously limned acrylic paintings on wood panels. Her ability to examine unflinchingly such personal milestones as her surgery for a benign brain tumor with a dazed self-portrait in a vertiginously askew hospital setting, results in some of the most emotionally jarring narrative imagery in recent art. However, her work can also be informed by an appealing light-heartedness, as seen in her whimsical picture of her professorial husband suspended in mid-air with a book seeming to take flight, like a startled bird, from his hands.

She is also a strong social satirist, particularly in paintings such as The Crowning with Sexism, which combines iconographic images of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio with a composition borrowed from Hieronymus Bosch, as well as in other Boschian extravaganzas such as The Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Times and The Seven Deadly Isms. The latter work is mounted on a circular table and comprised of several interconnecting compositions depicting such contemporary obsessions as “Materialism” and “Workaholism” in intricate figurative tableaux.

Susan Dorothea White’s use of unusual materials such as endangered and recycled woods native to Australia contributes significantly to the effectiveness of her work, with the grain showing through her translucent glazes in her paintings and the surface skillfully carved in mixed media sculptures such as It Cuts Both Ways. In the latter sculpture, black and white clasping hands morph into lethal-looking shears, while in White’s bronze maquettes for monumental fountains, natural phenomena are imaginatively transformed through the artist’s fluid handling of shapes in space.