Days of Awe: New Paintings
Susan Bee

GALLERY I

March 22 – April 20, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, March 22, from 6–8pm

Conversation with Kat Griefen and book signing: Sunday, April 6, from 3–5 pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Days of Awe, an exhibition of new paintings by Susan Bee, and the artist’s eleventh solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition centers on several series from 2023–2025 that translate mythological imagery from a diverse array of sources into bold paintings, examining how visual culture unfolds across centuries and contexts. 

Flouting the narrow designations of figurative or representational art, Bee’s paintings portray a mixture of linear and eccentric shapes in intensely vivid color. Built up in layers of oil, sand, and enamel, the paintings’ surfaces are alive with active brush and oil crayon marks, colors, textures, and patterns. Informed by German Romanticism and French symbolism, her process transforms images—trees, birds, eyes—into highly suggestive symbols. As Johanna Drucker writes in the catalog essay to Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works 1981–2023, Bee is “a painter of metaphors,” an artist whose chosen images are “embedded in chains of substitutions and allusions that lead us from their apparent form into imaginative realms.” That is why she has drawn on religious iconography in her most recent paintings. It is, as Drucker writes, “inherently symbolic, invoking cosmologies and values beyond the immediate world.” 

Days of Awe brings together several recent bodies of work. Three of these series expand upon Bee’s 2023 exhibition, Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries, by reimagining medieval representations of saints engaged in apocalyptic battle scenes. In the final series, Bee depicts the deities in the frescos she saw during her 2024 trip to Rajasthan, India, in February 2024. These mythical figures—including Kali, Trimurti, Durga, and Ganesha—are placed in composite imaginary landscapes and mixed with playful abstracted imagery. All of these series require the translation of imagery from one medium into another: tapestries and woodcuts in the medieval series, and photographed murals in the India works. The process of visual translation becomes a critical and creative act. A comparative mythology emerges as visual motifs repeat across canvases, prompting unexpected connections.

The first of the medieval series is inspired by the Apocalypse Tapestries from the Chateau d’Angers, which were created in the 1300s and depict scenes from the Book of Revelation. Foregrounding conflicts between angels and devils, the original tapestries center on the heroic aspects of the confrontation between good and evil. Bee’s paintings echo their sources while also addressing contemporary issues such as climate change, displacement, floods, and fire. Paintings in the second series, such as St. Florian Puts Out a Fire, St. Bernard Tames the Devil, and Elegy, draw from medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts. Elegy is based on an illuminated manuscript and focuses on a shrouded body being tended by an angel and two women, reenvisioning this imagery as contemporary icons of devotion. Also included are three paintings from 2025 based on images from the Siena paintings from the 1300s, which were recently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They show angels conquering devils and two kissing knights sheltered by a winged angel.

Bee’s new works imagine a world of faith and magic where strange and inexplicable events occur. They are fantastical, brightly colored, and energetic. Also included in the exhibition are enchanted symbolic landscapes, such as Pastorale, The Egg and I, and Sunspots. Here, Bee turns her attention from cultural mythology to personal mythology: these compositions contain autobiographical elements, including portraits of girls and women at various ages. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, Bee’s paintings pay homage to our individual and collective pasts while also confronting our present.

Susan Bee will be in conversation with art historian and gallerist Kat Griefen on Sunday, April 6, from 3–5pm. The event will conclude with a book signing for Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works 1981–2023, published by Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2024, with essays by Johanna Drucker, Raphael Rubinstein, and John Yau. 

Susan Bee has had eleven solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery. The first solo museum survey of her paintings, Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works 1981–2023, curated by Johanna Drucker, was presented at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 2024. She has had solo shows at many other venues and her work has been included in many group shows. Bee has published eighteen artist’s books. 

Her work has been reviewed in: Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, ArtSlant, The Forward, Huffington Post, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Provincetown Arts, Provincetown Independent, and many other publications.

Bee’s artwork and artist’s books are in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Getty Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Bee was the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G from 1986–2016. Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive are at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Bee has given presentations at the Whitney Museum, Reina Sofia, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, College Art Association, Queens Museum, NY Public Library, Parsons, The New School, Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, M.I.T., University of Pennsylvania, and at numerous other locations including in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Berlin, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, Israel, Cuba, New Zealand, Korea, and China.

She has a BA from Barnard College in 1973 and a MA in Art from Hunter College. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014 and has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn.

View Susan Bee’s page here.

View the Press Release here.