NEW YORK, NY—December 15, 2015—Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present I Am That, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by Suzanne Laura Kammin.

The relationship between figure and ground has always been an important exploration in Suzanne Laura Kammin’s work. In essence, her abstract paintings are self-portraits navigating the relationship between the self and everything else, both solid and psychological, through the juxtaposition of hard and soft edges and the meeting of intense color combinations. Her newest body of work continues this dynamic.

Kammin is influenced by 20th century painting in form and Eastern philosophy in concept, particularly the idea of an interconnectedness of all things. These muses play out in the reciprocation between the background and foreground of her works. Layers, lines and dots are distinct elements, but none is more important than another. They employ a flatness that is taken from the Modernist sense of space, which pushes positive and negative space front and back, to and fro. She allows the color to be loose in some areas and obsessively controlled in others. These visceral layers point to the idea that we ourselves are fluid and ever changing. Kammin completes the connection between a visual give-and-take and the concept of yin and yang, where opposite forces are interdependent.

While the works are concerned with the formal aspects of painting, like color, form and gesture, Kammin rarely allows the mark of the paintbrush to remain. Areas of color are smoothed to obscure the mode of creation in order to keep the view focused on what the work is doing, not how it was made. This allows the work to assert itself, moving beyond references to the traditional process of painting.

Suzanne Laura Kammin earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has received two grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and was nominated for The New School Distinguished University Teaching Award. Currently, she is a lecturer at Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ; a part-time Assistant Professor, at Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, NY; Founder and Instructor, Left Bank Studio School, Newark, NJ. Her work has been exhibited in the US and Canada. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.