Suzan Swale / Love’s Executioner
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Opening Times
Weekday opening hours: 10am – 6pm. Gallery closed on Sun, 14th Feb. Open Sat, 13th Feb / 11am – 6pm Sat 20th Feb / from 11am – 5pm
Suzan Swale has been exhibiting since 1969, in that time she has made installations, videos, photos and mixed media works, but the backbone of her work has always been painting.
The title for this exhibition ‘Love’s Executioner’ comes from a book by Irvin Yalom, in one chapter he describes how everyone can feel alone in their lives, their struggles, fear of death and suffering but:
“Though you are alone in your boat, it’s always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.”
Difficult things bring us together in a hard world.
The idea or source material for Suzan Swale’s work is often a single image, a photo she has taken, a sentence someone said, a line from a book or song, a headline from a newspaper, a scene from a film. All her work tries to have a dialogue with the spectator, sometimes political, sometimes poetic. Whilst Suzan Swale is an artist and a painter, she is also simply a witness to events.
This retrospective of Suzan Swale’s work covers a vast number of themes, ideas and approaches. It tracks the changing tides of our world over the past 50 years, charting movements around feminism, civil rights, world conflicts and personal struggle. Her work always tries to tell the truth, even when the truth is ugly or hard to look at.
Susan Swale / www.suzanswale.co.uk