Becky Suss at Jack Shainman Gallery

During the pandemic, many people became extremely familiar with their domestic spaces.  Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss turned up the intensity on her introspection by moving back into her childhood home with her young child and proceeding to paint scenes of her childhood bedroom from different points in her life.  Now on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, the new work reveals how she mined her memory for details from her past, creating scenes within scenes; here, each window in the dollhouse represents a setting from a different children’s story. (On view in Chelsea on 24th Street through June 18th.)

Becky Suss, 8 Greenwood Place (my bedroom), 84 x 60 x 2.5 inches, oil on canvas, 2020.

Becky Suss at Jack Shainman Gallery

The deep impact of children’s literature on young imaginations is the subject of Becky Suss’s marvelously detailed new paintings at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery, each of which focuses on a particular text.  Here, Suss calls on her own childhood experience of acting out Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Egypt Game with neighborhood friends, her memories of the book and the actual play mingled together in her recollection. (On view through March 28th).

Becky Suss, Behind the A-Z (Set vs Isis/Nefertiti), oil on canvas, 84 x 60 x 1 ½ inches, 2020.