Suellen Rocca
Suellen Rocca
*In reference to her solo exhibition, "Good Things and Bad Things," at Matthew Marks Gallery, visited in March 2025.
Suellen Rocca (1943–2020) was an artist from Chicago whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures explored figuration and storytelling with a multitude of figure icons in grid-like patterns. In the first years of her practice, she was part of the Hairy Who, a collective that exhibited together between 1966 and 1969, formed with fellow artists who also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum. During this time, her work was influenced by popular culture and aesthetics derived from different types of advertisements, as she pointed out: “Palm trees, diamond rings, bra styles in the Sears Roebuck catalog, dancing couples from Arthur Murray ads and pictures of fancy hairdos tucked into the back pages of magazines were the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.”1 Notions such as love and beauty were central to her works, as we can see in a series of paintings done on purses such as “First Kiss” (1968) and “Purse Curse” (1968), both showing a silhouette of a short-haired and a long-haired figure kissing and graphic elements pointing to ideas such as sparkle and excitement. Her works have always been informed by her experience of the world and the culture around her, but after the 1980s, as she returns to artmaking and Chicago–after living in California–, it turns inwards and starts exploring deeply personal questions.
As I visited the show “Good Things and Bad Things” at Matthew Marks Gallery last week, I was especially drawn to works from this period. The exhibition presents paintings, drawings, and objects made between 1964 and 2020, including works she did as part of the Hairy Who. The title of the show already brings an interesting direction to the visit as it comes from a fantastical and dream-like painting of 1982 showing blue and red birds and what appear to be a collection of eyes in a mirrored canvas in which the elements from one side converged to the other. Birds also appear in “Night” (2014), which is quite intriguing as it presents a delineated torso with interlaced arms and a composition with a canoe, two arms, and hands–seemingly from a different body–, and two of the birds on what can be seen both as tree branches and a venous system. Painted in a dark palette with blue, bright spots, this was the first work I saw on the show, and that accompanied me throughout the visit as it gave a tone for reflecting on the wonders of oneself, the multiplicity of happenings and feelings we experience, and the search for knowing us better when dreaming or awake. The idea of the investigation of oneself is present in works such as the drawing “Untitled" (2020), which depicts repeated houses, women, hands, what seems to be leaves, and beds in a diagram organized in lines and the colors blue, red, green, and graphite. This and other works, such as the painting “Untitled” (2020), formed by four panels, made me think of an effort to systematize or decode feelings and thoughts on paper or canvas. As the artist creates icons in the form of pictures, such as palm trees, beds, birds, and human figures that she would repeat in different works, she established a specific language but that we all can connect to. In a play of abstract and figuration, she reflects but never fully reveals herself to us as we cannot pinpoint exact thoughts. It is fascinating to look at different works in space and consider their themes and the intertwining ways one work connects to the other. It is interesting to notice the repetition not only of certain elements, such as female figures, beds, chairs, tables, and houses, all in the order of the domestic, but also the silhouette of the torso, also present in two other paintings, both named “Untitled” (2020), reinforcing a sense of one's body in the world and all the worlds they encompass.
1. Quote from the New York Times article “Suellen Rocca, Founding Member of the Hairy Who, Dies at 76,” written by Randy Kennedy and published on April 4, 2020.
