Peter Suchin
Compendiums and Palimpsests


Peter Suchin, Mannered Copy (1994), acrylic on board, 90 x 121 cm

T1 + 2 Artspace is pleased to host Compendiums and Palimpsests, Peter Suchin's first solo exhibition at a London venue. Suchin (b. 1959) is known for his critical, often polemical contributions to art and theory journals such as Frieze, Art Monthly, Contemporary, Variant and Mute. His practice as a painter has, however, been somewhat more sparingly displayed. This exhibition presents paintings completed between 1987 and 2003. A number of these works are being shown in public for the first time.

Suchin's paintings are each the result of an extensive process of revision and redefinition. Just as he has, in his capacity as an art critic, analysed the linguistic and institutional frameworks of art, Suchin has addressed in his paintings the sensuous, as it were implicit contingencies of the medium itself. These works can be read as "commentaries" upon the practice of painting, as well as coherent entities in their own right. The philosopher Paul Crowther has observed that "Suchin's paintings declare their sources - conscious or unconscious - quite manifestly...[his] "imagery" locates us in [an] ambiguous zone, where elements and relations hover before constellating into definitive figurative presence. He arrests the visible in the very act of its emergence." (Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 204).

Suchin most recently contributed to the exhibition 15/1(2) at 1,000,000 MPH, London (2003). His works are held in numerous private collections in Britain, Europe and the USA.

16th August - 28th September, 2003
Wednesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm


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