Susanna Heller : Intensive Care

This is an engaging and revealing look at the works created by artist Susan Heller while her husband was treated for a near fatal illness.

For decades, Susanna Heller has distilled the peripheral landscapes of New York City in her wildly expressive, near-abstract drawings and paintings.

Figures rarely appeared in Heller's work before March 2010, when her husband was hospitalized with a devastating illness.

To cope with the anxiety, during her bedside vigils Heller began to draw her agonized, silent husband and his setting.

In her catalogue essay, Karen Wilkin compares the new drawings with Heller's urban paintings, "The passive figure isolated on the bed, the complicated surroundings of the life-sustaining hospital equipment, the glimpses of an iconic view of the city outside the window all become, spatially and pictorially, elements in a 'landscape that we recognize from her urban images, with their elastic space and fractured viewpoints."