OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Paintings

Suzan Batu

February 7 - March 1, 2003
Reception: Friday, February 7, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Suzan Batu's paintings are spare and dynamic. Her use of searingly bright color with fluid, decorative forms creates an energetic tension and a sense of hyper-reality. Batu, who is Turkish, is clearly influenced by Middle Eastern design motifs, although her work is also informed by the Western influences of Pop and Op art.

The matte surfaces of Batu's paintings are well suited to the elegantly lyrical, sometimes languorous movement of her subtly rendered forms. Undisturbed by evident brushwork, shapes move sensually over the painted surfaces like smoke, or vibrate to a pulsing rhythm. The color in these paintings is bold. In Untitled, one of three 4 ft. square pieces, a red-orange arabesque dances languidly across the blue-grey background, while the edges where colors meet quiver with contained energy. Although the forms often seem secondary to the outrageous color, it is their subtlety and wit that balance and underscore the color.

In the Project Room smaller oval works are installed salon fashion. This not only creates a vivid, animated environment, but raises questions about the history and definition of painting.

"Salon style arrangements of small painted works have multiple history. In salons-of-old worthy pictures hung near the ceiling and were considered available to receive equal attention from viewers, a strange and seemingly counter-logical conceit from our vantage point today 30 or 40 years after the world-wide adoption of the clean white cube paradigm."
– Bill Arning about Suzan Batu at Jeffrey Coploff Gallery / NYC / 1997

Suzan Batu lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in New York at Jeffrey Coploff Gallery and White Columns Gallery, as well as internationally. This is her first exhibition at O·H+T gallery.