Sea Meets Sky presents the most recent paintings of Susan Vecsey. Her solo show at Liget Gallery is also her first introduction to Hungarian audiences. In the gallery space, a selection of small-scale oil paintings and collaged linens give testimony to her understanding of the optical sublime.

Vecsey abstracts the experience of the landscape through painting. Her artworks are the results of her walks along the shores of eastern Long Island: she captures what she can see with charcoal, and turns the sketches into paintings in her studio. She transforms the plein-air observations of shapes and colors into compositional questions. By using the technique of pouring, Vecsey eliminates the touch of the brush, letting the viewer’s gaze meditatively wander on the surface and discover the beauty of the material behind the pigments. The pleasant harmony emanating from her canvases carries no evidence of the deliberate, carefully accomplished process of making. While looking at her compositions, Vecsey liberates the viewer’s perception of her sustained course of artistic battle.

For approximately two decades, Vecsey has been exploring pouring as her primary technique, following the Color Field movement. Since then, her watercolor-like paintings have become more saturated and synthesized, using fewer colors and layering more depth. While her main body of work consists of large oil paintings and works on paper, these collaged oil paintings show a more recent and related body of work.

Susan Vecsey was born and raised in New Jersey. Currently she lives and works in New York City and East Hampton. She received her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, and her master’s from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, where she studied under Graham Nickson. As Vecsey’s parents are Hungarian immigrants, she frequently visited Hungary in the eighties and nineties. The event of the exhibition is therefore also an occasion for her to return to her parent’s homeland.

Text by Lili Rebeka Tóth
The exhibition is supported by BuBu Residency and Gittinger Pince (gittinger.wine)

Photos by Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss