Susannah Phillips: New Paintings

Susannah Phillips: New Paintings
September 18 – October 31, 2025
Reception: Thursday, September 18th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Susannah Phillips. This is the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery.

The subject matter of these paintings is a continuation of the theme from the artist’s last exhibition, which depicts painting racks in a studio storeroom. The works in the current show include the same interior but with the addition of elements from even earlier pictures, such as a polyhedral sculpture by Howard Kalish, an easel, a cityscape seen through an open window and a figurative painting propped against the wall.

While the artist paints each interior many times over, the brushwork and degree of abstraction are unique to each painting. Long looking is rewarded: throughlines from painting to painting give way to a wide variation in the articulation of forms, the handling of line and, most notably, the palette.

Often thought of as painting only neutral pictures or as having a limited palette, the artist Leopold Plotek describes how Phillips paintings are actually evidence of her great achievements as a colorist, He observes:

Paintings which appear to court sheer darkness reveal a richness of color when the darkness is made visible. These are lessons once taught so austerely by Ad Reinhardt (and at the opposite pole of light by Agnes Martin) but recent abstract painters have seemed mostly uninterested to learn them. Phillips is, in her own way, just as austere and as abstract (in the old-fashioned meaning), but hers is an intimate and domestic austerity, clinging to the qualities of lived experience, remembered and refined by trial and error. Her paintings offer a vast lexicon of chromatic blacks, greys and unnamable ‘broken’ colors perhaps best seen by cats; but the world they describe in their blunt diction becomes wonderfully nuanced the closer we attend to it.

Susannah Phillips was born in 1952 in Boston, Massachusetts but was raised in London. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying under William Coldstream and Euan Uglow. Her paintings have been in exhibitions in London, New York, Montreal, Aspen, CO and Provincetown, MA, and are included in numerous private collections. In 2014 and 2017, she was awarded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Susannah Phillips: New Paintings will be on view from September 18 – October 31, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 18th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.