Susan Tepper: Paintings 1978-1983 At Tripoli Gallery

Tripoli Gallery in Southampton presents East Hampton painter "Susan Tepper: Paintings 1978-1983," opening Saturday. An exhibition, organized with the artist's estate, will feature a catalogue with an essay by Julie Belcove that will be published for the occasion. An opening reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 PM. The show runs through September 19. This is the first solo exhibition of the artist's work since 1989. In 2015, Guild Hall publicly reintroduced paintings by Tepper in its group exhibition, "Selfies and Portraits by Artists of the East End," where six of Tepper's portraits were seen alongside works by Joan Semmel, Ahn Doung, Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman, and Billy Sullivan, among others. The show includes twenty-two abstracted faces, called "Heads." Most are rendered bald, their gender indeterminate. This blurring of lines between masculine and feminine is a result of the artist's observation that, "sometimes we split right down the middle." Some of the portraits are flat and collaged; others partly three-dimensional, their eyes fashioned from paint tubes' metal components, their mouths built up high from acrylic paint dried, then peeled from the bottom of paint containers. The exhibition will also feature a selection of collage and acrylic paintings on masonite that the artist embarked on in 1978 as part of her "100 Women" series. Her goal was to portray, continuously and progressively, the female form in a direct frontal position. Tepper's haunting portraits are expressive, often turbulent depictions of the female body in bold, vibrant colors. "I am a painter of content — images of women swept into caves of isolation," she wrote. "I paint the story of this condition." Tepper's women, both expressive and aggressive, could be read as a figurative call to arms and as psychological self-portraits. In her lifetime, Tepper participated in several group exhibitions at Ashawagh Hall and Guild Hall in East Hampton and at Painting Space Gallery at PS 122 in New York City from 1984 to 1986. She had solo exhibitions in 1989 at both the Benton Gallery in Southampton and the E.M. Donahue Gallery in New York's East Village, but otherwise rarely displayed her work publicly. While Tepper maintained a studio in New York City, eventually East Hampton became primary to her life and work. From 1977-1991 she made work in her Georgica Road studio, and in 1985 she co-founded the East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art on Newton Lane. The non-profit venue showcased emerging artists such as Petah Coyne, Patrick Dougherty, Nene Humphrey, and Joan Semmel, among others. It closed just prior to her death in 1991.

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