![]() ![]() One doesn’t need to know about the artist’s commitment to ecological issues to intuit her empathy for the environment–it’s there to see in the paintings. Hettmansperger’s meditations on natural history are, in fact, earnest and felt. ![]() Her work is bereft of the superficiality that tends to characterize art labeled as such. It would be misleading to pigeonhole Hettmansperger’s paintings as post-modern. Sue Hettmansperger, Untitled (2009-2010), oil on linen, 27″ x 30″ courtesy A.I.R. Her’s is an art of diversity and intrigue, not concision. Hettmansperger’s work deepens the mystery of nature while, paradoxically, displaying its constituent parts in an almost mathematical manner. Yet the natural world, however dissected and classified, remains autonomous and bewildering. It’s as if the artist were daring us to add up the images in order to clarify their mutual ambiguity. In another, a sketchy linear network–is it a map or a human organ?–nudges against an insect-like form which coasts precariously toward the viewer. In one painting, a plant-like biomorph bobs alongside an amorphous field and an array of brushstrokes suggesting cellular architecture. ![]() We “read” the paintings in a piecemeal manner, taking in each shape individually. In the work, clusters of objects are laid out for us, setting up a kind of 1-2-3 dialogue between forms. Even when the compositions are chock full, as in her drawing installations, Hettmansperger’s particulars have elbowroom. Hettmansperger’s paintings are democratic presentations of imagery, with each component given its own iconographic emphasis. There they commingle and fluctuate, slowly disclosing an (at times fleeting) interconnectedness. Her forms are transposed, if not entirely divorced, from their pedagogical context and placed into an enveloping and slightly ominous space. (Among the artist’s inspirations is the sixteenth century anatomist Vesalius.) Yet Hettmansperger’s paintings aren’t merely inventories. The analytical aspect of the imagery is patent: there is in the work a satisfaction taken in the step-by-step cataloguing of natural phenomena. The elements of Hettmansperger’s pictorial vocabulary–a cross section of bronchial tubes, for instance, of the leaves of a plant–bring to mind illustrations from technical charts and textbooks. Her paintings are shifting conglomerations of flora, fauna, microscopic lifeforms, human anatomy and cartographic diagrams. In the art of Sue Hettmansperger, the natural world is evoked both as a scientific discipline and an ecological conundrum. Sue Hettmansperger, Untitled (2011), oil on linen, 30″ x 27″ courtesy A.I.R. ![]()
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