Suellen Rocca: In Dreams, The Last Works

This online version of the exhibition Suellen Rocca: In Dreams, The Last Works includes 28 paintings and drawings made in the final two decades of Rocca’s life.

Rocca’s work is deeply personal, even when the images she uses are taken from popular culture. One of the original members of the Hairy Who, the group of six visionary artists who first exhibited together in 1966, her work has influenced several generations of artists.

The torso of a woman holding fish, which is a recurring image in her later work, originates from a dream she had while studying symbolism in the paintings of Max Beckmann. The chair, bed, and table in many of her later works was inspired by a group of doll house furniture from the 1950s that she discovered in her basement.

Rocca’s last two paintings, completed shortly before her untimely death in 2020, show her uniting the images of the torso of a woman with the hieroglyphic, pattern-like drawings that first appeared in her paintings more than 50 years earlier. This impulse to return to her past and to mine a personal lexicon of images is rooted in the artist’s intense desire to look carefully. “What I tell my students now is you need to look,” Rocca said, “because after we think we’ve seen things we don’t look at them anymore.”

When you're making art it's like you're in sort of a state … where you make connections in ways that you don't normally make them, that's more like a dream.

—Suellen Rocca

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The development of the image is what's exciting to me and it happens as I'm working. There's an initial image of something that I'm interested in but I don't do studies. I like to work on drawings at the same time I'm working on a painting and they complement each other.

—Suellen Rocca

[Rocca was a] fiercely original artist whose hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities.

—Randy Kennedy

Drawing by Suellen Rocca, , dated 1997 — Suellen Rocca

*Fish Dream* 1997
Graphite on paper
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9/28

My work has always been autobiographical.

—Suellen Rocca

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Maintained throughout her decades-long career was an unceasing commitment to capturing the perplexities and the appetites of woman. Rocca was never as literal as to conspicuously depict powerlessness or oppression, instead she invented bodies and aggregated signs to wrestle with the ebbing authority of gender in everyday life and the culture at large.

—Michelle Grabner

Painting by Suellen Rocca, , dated 2012 — Suellen Rocca

*Departure* 2012
Oil on canvas
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17/28

Painting by Suellen Rocca, , dated 2013 — Suellen Rocca

*At Sunset* 2013
Oil on canvas
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18/28

The imagery in my work from the Hairy Who period was more about external things, things from the culture. The work starting in the early ’80s was more about what was going on with me internally.

—Suellen Rocca

Rocca’s wonderfully illogical sense of space and the barbed femininity of her symbols are a winning combination.

—Johanna Fateman

Drawing by Suellen Rocca, , dated 2019 — Suellen Rocca

*Studies for The Mother and the Bed* 2019
Graphite and colored pencil on paper, nine sheets
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23/28

Rocca is giving us a new lexicon with these images, a way of reevaluating the everyday to see its magical worth.

—Allison Grimaldi Donahue

In Memory of Suellen RoccaOctober 2, 1943 – March 26, 2020