Susan Sensemann

Susan Sensemann (born 1949) is an American artist, educator and arts administrator, best known for her detailed, largely abstract patterned paintings and photomontages reflecting gothic, baroque, spiritual and feminist sensibilities.

She has exhibited her work at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, A.I.R., The Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Indianapolis Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, and Art Institute of Boston, on four continents.

Her work has been widely reviewed and resides in numerous private, university and corporate collections.

Sensemann is known as a versatile and prolific creator, whose ideas have led her to explore diverse painting materials, media (drawing, photography, collage, performance), subject matter (architectural, botanical, biological and organic forms, self-portraiture), and styles from abstraction to realism.

Critics note her work's densely packed compositions, shallow fields of oscillating space, complex tactile surfaces, and sensuous color and linearity.

James Yood wrote that Sensemann's abstract paintings were "fraught with meaning, charged with value, and seething with import" in their spiritual seeking.

Art historian Leisa Rundquist described her photomontage self-portraits as "strangely sensual, yet disturbing" images drawn from "the depths of the unconscious."

In addition to her art career, Sensemann was an art professor and administrator for over three decades, most notably at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the grassroots women's cooperative Artemisia Gallery.

She has also been a frequent curator and lecturer, and in recent years, begun writing fiction and teaching courses in mindfulness meditation.

Sensemann lives and works in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Sensemann was born in Glen Cove, New York in 1949.

Her early interest in art was sparked by trips with her mother to New York City art museums and a supportive art teacher who introduced her to Cubism in sixth grade.

In the 1970s, Sensemann focused on small egg-tempera and oil paintings of feminist archetypes such as Salome and Magdalene and "fantastic landscapes" of dense, brightly colored botanical imagery that flirted with both realism and abstraction.

She studied printmaking at Syracuse University (BFA, 1971), but gravitated to painting after spending junior year at the Tyler School of Art, Rome.

She enrolled in the graduate program at Tyler at Temple University (MFA, painting, 1973), studying with painter Richard Callner, whose mythological paintings and glazing techniques influenced her early work.

In 1973, Sensemann took a teaching position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

While there, she met her future husband, sculptor Barry Hehemann.

They married in 1979 and moved into a live/work loft in Chicago's industrial Bucktown neighborhood (they divorced in 2004).

Her move to Chicago in 1979 inspired a shift to abstract, architectonic work that nonetheless suggested actual spaces.

Often titled after mythological goddesses, the new paintings explored the spirit and psychological implications of austere interiors that symbolized the domain of women.

Sensemann enlivened the spaces with ghost-like whorls or spirals that hinted at kinetic energy, "spiritual emanations" or traces from unseen or absent actors and encounters.

In 1981, Sensemann joined the faculty at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she would remain until 2010.

After she and Hehemann had two children, Lucas (b. 1981) and Marah (b. 1985).

Sensemann continued to show internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Roy Boyd, Artemisia (both Chicago), Fay Gold (Atlanta) and Locus (St. Louis) galleries and the Evanston Art Center, among many.

She initially based the works on architectural forms she photographed on trips to Italy ("Tusculana" series) or Japanese art and kabuki forms, before turning to structures from pre-Renaissance paintings by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Giotto and Piero della Francesca in the "Annunciation" works (1983–4).

Painted in reds, cranberries, tangerines and aquas, works such as Eguchi (1983) employed geometric organizations of architectural planes, light and shadow that created ambiguous space, yet anchored complex, scoured impasto surfaces described as "painstakingly textured, almost sculptural relief."

Critic James Yood suggested Sensemann's "churning brushwork, intense colors, stippled surfaces, and abstract symbology" signified a pursuit of higher knowledge through the methods of modern art.

Sensemann moved toward sparer geometric forms in later series such as "Shekina" (1989–90), whose title derives from a Hebrew word associated with feminine divine attributes.

Alan Artner described them as the culmination of a "process of reduction that long has signaled an artistic quest for spiritual purity."

The looming U.S. Gulf War focused Sensemann in a more discordant, political direction in her "State" series (1990), which used geometric shapes to reference gun sights and targets, and thick paint application to create flux through shifts of light and vantage point.

In the "Gulf War" series (1991), she translated masterworks of conflict and violence by Caravaggio, Delacroix, Gericault and Rembrandt into charged, jostling compositions of unrestrained abstract color, light and texture.

Within these darker, chaotic works she placed unexpected "intrusions," such as the word "raft" or outlined votive candles, signaling the possibility of hope or resolution.

Critic Kristin Schleifer described these expressionist paintings as a logical progression in Sensemann's work that evoked the forces of nature with a greater vitality than ever before.

In 1993, Sensemann made an overt break with the strife of the "Gulf War" works and abstraction.

She began creating decorative, collaged oil paintings on upholstery fabric that recalled the overflowing compositions and patterns of her fantastic landscapes.

The paintings also indicated a shift to the more direct critical language of feminist collage.

In a subsequent series of 600 collages, she embraced strategies of juxtaposition, fragmentation and rupture, reflecting the alternative influence of Hannah Höch, Meret Oppenheim, Martha Rosler and writer Susan Griffin.

She also served as co-president and board member of Artemisia Gallery (1994–2001), where she co-created international artist exchange and mentoring programs, curated shows, and exhibited and lectured internationally on women's issues in art.

Sensemann describes her approach to art as "expansive, holistic, multi-focused, and non-hierarchical," and cites the influence of feminist artists such as Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse and Harmony Hammond, as well as Italian Renaissance painters like Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and Bellini.

These influences manifest in her work's emphasis on visual and tactile sensuality and themes of indeterminacy, transformation, and what she calls "restless becoming."