Susan Vecsey

Susan Vecsey (b. 1971) is a contemporary American painter whose luminous abstract landscapes have earned her a substantial place within the ongoing tradition of American Color Field and post-painterly abstraction. Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Vecsey was raised in a dual culture by parents who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1969. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her Master of Fine Arts from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, studying under Graham Nickson. In 2012 she served as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Vecsey creates abstractions from perception, employing the pouring techniques of the Color Field tradition. Landscape or figure serves as a starting point, a vehicle for the exploration of form and color, with compositions simplified to their essence in order to create a universal image. The artist begins each work with charcoal drawings and then develops extensive color studies to identify the three or four colors that will lock together visually within a single composition. She works like a watercolorist but with thinned oil paint, carefully pouring the pigment in a wet-in-wet process. No brushes are used in the application, an intentional discipline designed to avoid brush marks and to better reveal the beauty of the materials themselves. As she has observed, "With poured paint, timing is everything, and it is important to be decisive with it, and also ready to accept or reject the unexpected."

Vecsey's characteristic paintings feature simple horizontal bands of color that resolve into abstracted landscapes, with her palette shifting between cool ocean blues, warm sunset oranges and pinks, quiet grays, and the golden yellows of coastal light. In 2017 she had a solo museum exhibition at the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina, featuring numerous large-scale paintings and accompanied by a catalog with an essay by the art historian Phyllis Tuchman. In reference to Vecsey's 2014 show at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, Franklin Einspruch declared in Artcritical that "this is virtuoso painting." She has been exhibited alongside many notable artists, including Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, James Brooks, Elaine de Kooning, Alfonso Ossorio, Charlotte Park, Perle Fine, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Jane Freilicher, Frank Bowling, Mary Heilmann, David Salle, Sean Scully, and Jeffrey Gibson.

Vecsey was represented exclusively by Ira Spanierman at Spanierman Modern, New York, from 2009 to 2014. At its inception in 2014, Berry Campbell announced her representation. She is widely held in both public and private collections and is represented by Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, Maya Frodeman Gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Quogue Gallery in Quogue, New York. Vecsey lives and works in New York City and East Hampton, New York.