Open Frequency 2006: Susan Gunn selected by Cherry Smyth

Open Frequency 2006: Susan Gunn selected by Cherry Smyth Susan Gunn, Spectro Spectus, 2005. Wax, pigment and gesso on canvas and board. 245cm x 306cm x 10cm

Cherry Smyth profiles the work of Susan Gunn


The first thing that strikes you about Susan Gunn's abstract paintings is their physicality. Most are larger and heavier than their spectator. This monumentality provokes the awe and respect associated with large steel sculptures. Mostly monochrome, they appear dense at first, a single ground, until you get closer and textures start to play with light and multiply before you.

Gunn was awarded the 2006 Sovereign European Painting Prize for her uncompromising single-colour canvases. Her large-scale paintings have a tactile, material presence, built from layers of pigment and gesso, punctuated by chance occurrences in the surface, as the canvas splits and cracks during the process of drying. As the heavily worked gesso is waxed and polished, the artist regains a lost sense of control and areas of the surface become reflective, inviting a physical dialogue between voyeur and object. The nearly monochrome, fissured ground suggests resilience and delicacy and the rich pigment brings depth and solemnity to the canvas. Gunn's work is deeply moving in its attempt to arrest time, accommodate change and explore beneath the surface. Her visceral, loaded work has the monochromatic discipline of Robert Ryman and the meticulous abstraction of Callum Innes. (Cherry Smyth).

The materiality of gesso becomes the subject and object of Gunn's paintings. Whiting, the main constituent of gesso, consists of pure calcium carbonate: mined from sedimentary rock and ground into dust, this elementary material is one of the most common natural substances, a precursor to marble. Traditionally a formative 'ground' on to which paint is applied, Gunn uses this historic substance in a new and contemporary way. The paintings invoke the passage of time through the evolution of materials and process: layer upon layer, the body of the painting is built, each layer bonding with the last to form a taut exterior skin. Gunn controls the environmental conditions to withdraw moisture from the paintings, embracing the flawed beauty of chance imperfections as their surfaces crack and fissure in reaction to the atmosphere. These 'imperfections' resonate defiantly against the strict geometry and formalism of the canvases:

'There is a subtle tension between the golden section formalism of their geometry and the unruliness of the free-form cracking. They each balance control and abandon, deliberation and chance. This is not the frivolous feminine but the ferocious one, celebrating healing from trauma and taking up space, unapologetically majestically'. (Smyth).

Gunn writes: 'The limitation of the painting genre reiterates a reference to the human body - its edges confine its history, which is disclosed to the viewer over time. The act of looking becomes a kind of reversal of the act of making, since it is from the finished object that one takes a mental journey backwards in order to reconstruct the series of actions by which it has come into being. The entity of painting embodies the immediacy of an encounter. My intention is to provoke tacit responses both to the object of the painting and its surface, presenting not a representation of any nameable thing but a poetics, in the fundamental sense of poesis: a movement of coming into thought of the process of making. The viewer's gaze is invited to meander, metaphorically, over the ground of the painting and to piece together the varied surfaces which contain subtle and obvious imperfections that spill and digest, reflect and absorb. Developing my practice within these references my aim is to extenuate an innovative language in the ongoing genre of contemporary painting.'

Cherry Smyth, May 2006

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Artist's biography

Susan Gunn graduated from Norwich School of Art & Design in 2004 with a BA Hons degree (First Class) in Fine Art. During her studies she was awarded the prestigious Bishops Prize for Painting (2002) and was the recipient of an Escalator award from Arts Council England East in 2004, which recognises and supports the most promising emerging artists living and working in the East of England. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and the UK and recently acquired for the Archant National Collection and the Sovereign Art Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the prestigious Archant prize at the RA selected Summer Show at the Norwich Castle Museum. A recent commission included work exhibited as part of the Escalator group show Stay05, curated by Cherry Smyth at the Great Eastern Hotel in London.

The Sovereign European Painting Prize exhibition, of which Gunn was the 2006 recipient, is now on display at the City Hotel, Westminster, London and will travel to the City Art Gallery, Prague where the next Sovereign European Painting Prize will be held. She lives and works in Norwich.


About Cherry Smyth

Cherry Smyth is a critic, curator and poet. She writes regularly for Modern Painters, Art Monthly, Kaleidoscope, Art Review and Circa. 

Catalogue essays include 'Normapaths: the work of Jane and Louise Wilson', CHISENHALE Gallery, 1995; ‘Flown and Sealed: the Work of Orla Barry‘, TEMPLE BAR Gallery, Dublin, 2002; ‘Intimate Handling: the work of Dirk Braeckman’, A PRIOR, Brussels, 2002; ‘Cylindrical Music: The Work of Simon Hitchens’, CADOGAN CONTEMPORARY, 2003; ‘Gnaw at the Barrier: the work of Emma Woffenden and Ann Course’, FIRST SITE AND ANGLE ROW Galeries, 2004 and ‘No Respect’, PROJECT ARTS CENTRE, Dublin, 2004, ‘Private Emergencies’, on Salla Tykka for CHAPTER ARTS, Cardiff, 2006,
Behind the Light’, Elizabeth Magill at WILKINSON GALLERY, 2008, ‘Gathering Life’, Hannah Maybank for ARTSWAY, 2009, and ‘Radiant Vitality’, the work of Thomas Flechtner, for ‘Bloom’, LARS MULLER Publications, 2007.

She was a visiting critic at Braziers International Art Workshop and at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Castello, Spain. She was a visiting lecturer at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2005. She has given gallery talks at Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and the Kerlin Gallery.

She was the curator for Stay, a group show of 11 emerging artists at the Great Eastern Hotel, London, July, 2005 with Commissions East. She was a curatorial adviser for Axis' online showcase, Open Frequency, 2006.


Open Frequency keeps you in touch with new developments in contemporary art practice from across the UK. The artists are selected and profiled by leading curators, artists and writers, presenting the work of artists to watch out for over the coming year. Open Frequency represents a forward-looking glance today of the artists who will be setting the agenda tomorrow.