SUZAN WOODRUFF PRESS

Suzan Woodruff: Back from the Edge opens Saturday, May 11, 4-7pm at Billis Williams Gallery. As a painter Suzan Woodruff has always been attracted to the edges—of things, of knowledge, of poetry and spirit, of darkness and light, in places where the earth and sea and sky meet, and places where fire and ice touch, geologically and metaphorically. Her painstakingly engineered yet foundationally intuitive abstract compositions echo and express a state of perpetual, universal liminality, enacting in pigment and motion the phenomenological cavortings of her terrestrial and celestial muses. But in the past few years, the edges she has explored have come to include silence and battle, faith and despair, and even, quite literally life and death. Like many cosmonauts of the soul before her, and also like many painters who have pushed and tested the limits of what their materials (and bodies) can endure, she’s back from the edge with intensely energetic, richly surfaced captures of the barely controlled, impossibly beautiful chaos that’s unfurling out there at this very moment. On view in Culver City through June 8; free; billiswilliams.com.