Susan Sensemann

Susan Sensemann (born 1949) is an American artist, educator and arts administrator, best known for her detailed, largely abstract patterned paintings and photomontages reflecting gothic, baroque, spiritual and feminist sensibilities. She has exhibited her work at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, A.I.R., The Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Indianapolis Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, and Art Institute of Boston, on four continents. Her work has been widely reviewed and resides in numerous private, university and corporate collections. Sensemann is known as a versatile and prolific creator, whose ideas have led her to explore diverse painting materials, media (drawing, photography, collage, performance), subject matter (architectural, botanical, biological and organic forms, self-portraiture), and styles from abstraction to realism. Critics note her work's densely packed compositions, shallow fields of oscillating space, complex tactile surfaces, and sensuous color and linearity.

Life and career Sensemann was born in Glen Cove, New York in 1949. Her early interest in art was sparked by trips with her mother to New York City art museums and a supportive art teacher who introduced her to Cubism in sixth grade.

Work and reception

Sensemann describes her approach to art as "expansive, holistic, multi-focused, and non-hierarchical," and cites the influence of feminist artists such as Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse and Harmony Hammond, as well as Italian Renaissance painters like Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and Bellini. These influences manifest in her work's emphasis on visual and tactile sensuality and themes of indeterminacy, transformation, and what she calls "restless becoming." of dense, brightly colored botanical imagery that flirted with both realism and abstraction. Sensemann enlivened the spaces with ghost-like whorls or spirals that hinted at kinetic energy, "spiritual emanations" She initially based the works on architectural forms she photographed on trips to Italy ("Tusculana" series) or Japanese art and kabuki forms, Alan Artner described them as the culmination of a "process of reduction that long has signaled an artistic quest for spiritual purity." Susan Sensemann, State, oil on canvas, three panels, each 60” x 24", 1990.

"Gulf War" works The looming U.S. Gulf War focused Sensemann in a more discordant, political direction in her "State" series (1990), which used geometric shapes to reference gun sights and targets, and thick paint application to create flux through shifts of light and vantage point. In the "Gulf War" series (1991), she translated masterworks of conflict and violence by Caravaggio, Delacroix, Gericault and Rembrandt into charged, jostling compositions of unrestrained abstract color, light and texture. The paintings also indicated a shift to the more direct critical language of feminist collage. In a subsequent series of 600 collages, she embraced strategies of juxtaposition, fragmentation and rupture, reflecting the alternative influence of Hannah Höch, Meret Oppenheim, Martha Rosler and writer Susan Griffin. Carefully superimposing photographs she took of organic substances over intimate close-ups of her face, she merged with flora, seaweed or cacti in "De-Monstrations" works such as Hide (1998), producing grotesque and seductive alterations to her flesh that suggested decay, ravage or regeneration, endured with a facial expression of impassivity. These works, created through non-digital means and ultimately numbering more than 700, recalled cultural constructions of symbiosis between women and nature and were interpreted as meditations on the transience and the ephemerality of life, the passage of time and its effects, and notions of beauty, eroticism and glamour. fusing with marble busts, statuary, Roman murals and decorative objects to take on a range of characters: Buddha, temptress, princess, king, gnome, monster.

"Dots" and "Nets" series Sensemann returned to more abstract art in the 2000s, with several bodies of large-scale, baroque works in which accumulations of small marks, dots, dashes or blips collide and overlap to create dizzying fields of complex patterns. The "Night Sky" series (2005–7) featured more neutral, monochrome palettes and forms referencing constellations, sea life and human biology. An offshoot of that work was a show of large—up to 35 feet—realistic, but patterned drawings of natural and organic forms that some considered among Sensemann's most brave and intriguing work. The "Dots" series (2007–11), which includes paintings such as Solitary Pleasures (2016), extended her explorations of pattern to more colorful, oscillating forms reminiscent of flora, cells, or hives. With the "Indra's Net" (2016–8) works, she focused on skewed grid patterns of intricate net and lace-like arrangements, that ranged from organic to almost geometric and expressed a Buddhist visualization of interconnectedness and a feminist critique of 1960s, hard-edged abstraction.

Career as educator Sensemann began teaching in 1973 at the school of art and design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She earned tenure at age 30, leaving as an associate professor in 1981 for the school of art and design, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Curating and writing Sensemann has been an active curator, at venues including the Evanston Art Center, Gallery 400, and Artemisia Gallery. Described as "curatorially adventurous," She has also written poetry and fiction, and given performances of her work at galleries and clubs. Her "Consorting with Nathaniel Hawthorne" series (2002–4) paired photomontages of her face and silk funerary arrangements, such as Burst... (2003), with poems on love and loss that she wrote through a self-devised game plucking words from Hawthorne's short stories.

Collections and recognition Sensemann's works are held in private, university and corporate collections, including the Illinois State Museum, Purdue University, Northeast Normal University (China), University of Delaware, Southern Illinois University, Millikin University, Ripon College and Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences, among many.