Opening Saturday March 19th 2-5pm
Susanna Heller lives and paints in Brooklyn. She walks every day up and down the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, wildly sketching the urban landscape. Influenced by the works of Paterson Ewen and J. W. Turner, Heller’s paintings focus on space and movement, offering a constant sense of motion on the canvas. Through her application of colour and paint, Heller has spent decades perfecting wind, light, and smoke. Her work brings clarity to the energy, smells and sounds of the city; perspectives are distorted, and cranes sweep across the sky as though holding up the clouds.
Often from a bird’s eye view, we are provided with the moods of an urban atmosphere at the mercy of the natural elements, influenced and changed by dawn or rain, and an accompanying sense of flight or heady vertigo. Heller’s paintings encapsulate entire cityscapes – buildings crowded together below massive weather systems shifting and changing, full of energy and in perpetual turmoil – the eye of a rumbling storm, a swinging crane, a swiftly passing cloud.
Even in her most expressive paintings of sun or storm, the city is always present; it is a distinct reminder of our home and heart and life under the enormity of Heller’s skies.
Image Credit: Olga Korper Gallery
