Past Exhibition · March 14 – May 9, 2025
Susan Weil
A key figure in postwar American art, she was deeply connected to the Abstract Expressionist movement and among the pioneering artists exploring new dimensions of form, space, and movement in painting.
Installation Views
AT THE GALLERY
Susan Weil
Exhibited Artworks
CHECKLIST
For questions about available works, contact us
THE ARTIST
A Life in Motion
Susan Weil
American | b.1930, New York
Susan Weil is an American artist whose seven-decade practice has continually expanded the possibilities of the picture plane. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and artist books, Weil cuts, folds, crumples, layers, and reassembles images to explore the fluid experience of time, movement, and perception. Figures shift between multiple positions, perspectives overlap, and painted surfaces become sculptural objects—allowing several moments to coexist within a single work.
“I’ve spent a lifetime working. It’s been both a serious and a joyful journey and I have no intention of slowing down.”
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Helsinki City Art Museum; Haus der Kunst, Munich; National Museum, Stockholm; Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York.
Press Release
ABOUT THE SHOW
Susan Weil
DATES
March 14 – May 9, 2025
LOCATION
COL Gallery
Ghirardelli Square
San Francisco
ARTISTS
Susan Weil
Susan Weil (b.1930) is a New York-based artist known for her innovative approach to painting, collage, and mixed media.
A student at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, Weil studied under Josef Albers and was part of an influential circle that included Ruth Asawa, Elaine de Kooning, and Dorothea Rockburne. Throughout her career, she has developed a distinct visual language incorporating layered, fragmented compositions, dynamic paper constructions, and experimental materials.
For eight decades, Weil’s work has engaged with themes of deconstruction and transformation, often explored through the lens of abstraction and collage. Her early experimentations with multiple perspectives, layered compositions, and reconfigured forms reflect an interest in the complexities of perception, memory, and time.
Breaking apart and reconstructing compositions aligns with her broader exploration of the body, movement, and identity. In some of her most iconic works, Weil dissects figures and shapes, allowing them to interact with surrounding spaces, blurring the boundaries between the subject and the environment. Influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies, Weil too investigates the expression of motion and temporality. This process underscores the idea that our understanding of the world is always partial, fluid, and ever-changing—a concept embedded within the modernist tradition.
Weil’s work is also deeply connected to the female form and the pieces in the exhibition reflect Weil’s engagement with feminist perspectives as she reclaims and reconstructs the female body outside of conventional ideals. In her words, “When the women’s movement started, that was another focus for me. There were always women making art, but it wasn’t appreciated or paid attention to or treated equally at all,” Weil said, “The women’s movement was very important to correcting that situation.”
By fragmenting bodies and integrating them back into her compositions in an almost sculptural way, she challenges fixed notions of representation, inviting viewers to consider the body as both a site of meaning and transformation. Throughout the exhibition, past and present coexist in reconstructed yet meaningful ways. Drawing inspiration from literature, nature, and scientific concepts, she brings an intellectual depth to her art that extends beyond pure formalism.
Weil has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, with her work held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is represented by Sundaram Tagore Gallery and JDJ Gallery.