David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by American artist Suzan Frecon (b. 1941) at the gallery’s Paris location, marking her ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. This is the first one-person presentation of Frecon’s work in Paris since 1999. On view are recent canvases that elaborate on the artist’s enduring investigation of large-scale oil paintings, as well as richly textured paintings on paper.
Frecon is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she notes—“speak for themselves. ”Made over long stretches of time, her work invites the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, “are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience. ”1
The Light Factory attests to the artist’s engagement with the possibilities of her medium, and the exhibition’s title gestures to the ways in which light functions as a component of her paintings. Frecon’s works are characterized by asymmetrically balanced forms in precise spatial and proportional relationships; for the artist, composition serves as her foundational structure, holding color, material, and light. She mixes and applies pigments and oils to differing effects, heightening the visual experience of her work with an almost tactile use of color and contrasting matte and shiny surfaces, which in turn vary in terms of density and reflectivity, frequently shifting between dark and light. Figure can become ground and ground can become figure in, as the artist defines it, a back-and-forth of full and empty space.
The works on view elaborate on Frecon’s continued attention to the qualities and dimensions of each of her chosen pigments—an exploration that offers limitless combinations and effects. The exhibition includes works that explore juxtapositions of different tones and sheens of one color, such as embodiment of red version 14 (2023), which employs a longstanding motif of the artist, in which she engages with combinations of four red earth pigments, in this case mars red, soforouge, venetian, and tuscan. Two paintings on view, the larger-scaled bancha bamboo matcha (2025) and its smaller counterpart verona matcha (2024), employ the same compositional structure of an ovoid form comprising four irregularly measured quadrants resting in the lower half of a single vertical panel, a new format for Frecon; each presents a unique combination of two distinct terre verte, or earth green, pigments. In two blues 1 (2024), a central, darker blue made up of thin layers of indigo stretches across two panels and is surrounded by a luminous deep ultramarine; the same compositional structure achieves different effects in a smaller-scaled two blues 3 (2025).
© Text and Photo Courtesy of David Zwirner
- Suzan Frecon, “text and related work,” in Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015), p. 63.
