Becky Suss

“Suss’ paintings attend to the genealogy of caretaking and the everyday shapes that care takes: ordinary fabrics, simple language, routine.” – The New Yorker

Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss (born 1980) explores ideas of intimacy, domesticity and memory. Her large-scale paintings of interiors are holistic representations of the sensory and remembered qualities of space, while her small paintings of objects and books offer a library of charged personal items.

Devoid of figures, Suss’ style uses flattened architecture, exaggerated proportions and distorted perspective to amplify the tension between the factual and the fictitious, mirroring the plasticity of memory, continually reformed and revised. Suss often questions the stereotypes of domesticity as they relate to the lives of women in America; she is fascinated by American culture’s simultaneous dismissal of and dependence on homemaking and homemakers, and is inspired by her own personal heritage—the generations of women in her family who managed the domestic sphere without recognition. This hardcover volume surveys her work.