Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between by Eric Firestone Gallery

Susan Fortgang

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012

646.998.3727

ericfirestonegallery.com

Susan Fortgang

The Spaces in Between

January 15 – March 1, 2025

Essay by Stephen Westfall

Eric Firestone Press

Susan Fortgang, Interior with Red & Green, 1966, oil on canvas, 711/8 × 64 1/8 in.

The Long Game

This exhibition is a survey of nearly sixty years of work. It proceeds in clusters, coherent constellations, really: some closer together and others decades apart. But painting is a long game. I remember Joan Snyder telling a room of eager young graduates at a CAA convention, “it takes a long time to learn how to make a good painting,” something that nobody wanted to hear.

Barnett Newman was 43 when he had his first one person show, Hans Hofmann was 64. So, does an artist who grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, attended Queens College, then Yale in the sixties, who has lived and worked with her husband, the estimable painter and sculptor, Robert Schecter in Soho since the early seventies, and is now having her first solo exhibition in a private gallery in her eighties count as a “discovery?” It seems so far-fetched, yet here we are. Fortgang and Schecter met while matriculating for their BA degrees at Queens (she was an English major) and then both went to Yale to get their BFA and MFA degrees. Among Fortgang’s important teachers were Louis Finkelstein at Queens, and Jack Tworkov and Al Held at Yale. Her classmates at Yale included Howardena Pindell, William Conlon, and Fred Sandback. How, moving in this heady milieu, did she exhibit so infrequently? The obvious quality of her painting from an early start only deepens the mystery. Fortgang began studying painting as an undergraduate at Yale in earnest in 1965 and by 1966 was painting in oils fully realized gestural abstract paintings titled “Interiors,” as in Interior with Black & Red, 1966 (pl. 1). Yale had a program that allowed one to

STEPHEN WESTFALL

enter as fifth year BFA candidate, in order to pursue a subsequent MFA degree. She has referred to herself at this time as an “Action Painter,” identifying with Harold Rosenberg’s existentialist term rather than the more widely accepted “Abstract Expressionist.” The paintings are large and precociously confident, invoking Willem de Kooning’s oily excavating and cursive breaks in a palette that is both fleshy and lit by an interior light. Short, elegant zig-zag brushstroke stitching across colliding planar tectonics are whispered auguries of sharper and more pictorially binding compositional energies to reappear a little more than a decade later. The open drawing and fragments of architecture and fabrics set against more circular forms that could be table mats, the tops of heads, or breasts, along with the smoldering reds and blacks in her palette also recall some the great Henri Matisse interiors, like Interior With a Violin (1917–18)

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin, 1917–18, oil on canvas, 452/3 in × 35 in.

Collection of Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Four

No. 2, Entropy, 1972, oil, pencil, and

and the interiors from 1945 to 1948 that comprise his last oil paintings. Fortgang set up this encompassing play with the near history of Modernism as basically a fifth-year undergraduate in the Yale program.

By 1975, she had shifted mediums from oil to acrylic and had begun establishing gridded structures for her compositions, but the paintings veered away from Minimalist restraint in almost every other way. Like many other painters during the seventies, she employed tape to establish edges and to preserve passages of previous colors from overlays of subsequent color. In the earliest of these paintings, such as Painting with Maroon Bands and Drips, 1975 (pl. 3) and Rhapsody, 1975 (pl. 4), vertical drizzles of color interpenetrate taped-off horizontal bands like a seepage from a polychromatic spring down an exposed stone cliff. But a more pertinent analogy might

be textiles, with the drips acting as fringes or tassels. Fortgang was inspired partly by her own experiences with knitting, crochet and Bargello, and references to textiles become more prominent in her stated intentions. To this acknowledged purpose, I would add that a visual “conversation” was taking place at the time among the paintings of Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, and Mary Heilmann in which the austere spacing and definition of the Minimalist grid was being softened and dissolved into a liquidity that gently mocked the athletically heroic drips of Abstract Expressionism and, at the very least, Fortgang was part of this mini-Zeitgeist. Some people noticed. The Aldrich Museum included Rhapsody in their 1976 biennial, Contemporary Reflections 1975–76

The references to textiles and weaving in both Rhapsody and Painting with Maroon Bands and Drips

Susan Fortgang, Painting with Maroon Bands and Drips, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 831/4 × 653/4 in.

Pat Steir,

Directions of Time,

crayon on canvas, 831/16 × 711/16 in. Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Shaindy Fenton, 1977.66. © Pat Steir, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

reside in the optical tactility of concrete actions of color-as-paint rather than patterned fabric. The overlay of horizontal bands of paint and white ground exposed by pulling up the masking tape may comprise a sort of weaving, but they don’t yet give us an image of it. Rather, they find their communal conversation with the horizontal components of 70s grid paintings, color field, and the female post-Minimalists mentioned above. And yet, Fortgang was moving towards a more thorough commitment to pattern in her in own time and in her own way. She had been feeling that gestural drawing and drips constituted a “performative” sort of painting and was yearning for a more structural approach. She found that the process of taping over color to lay another color down and then pulling off the tape to reveal the masked-off color(s) underneath demanded more foresight while yielding

inevitable surprises, a personally pleasing mixture of the foreseen and unforeseen that bears a distinct relationship to the absorptive and conceptual process of weaving patterns in fabric. Furthermore, working with ground coats of acrylic modeling paste meant that the revealed layers would be unusually thick, with a roughness to the edges that is the polar opposite of the clean edges of shapes associated with the taping process since the advent of “hard edge painting.”

A good example of a transition painting between the last of the drip paintings and the flatter and more predetermined allover patterns to follow is Signal, 1977 (pl. 5). Here, the drips have almost entirely disappeared into a scratchy vertical grid with two central pairs of wider vertical bands of black spacing narrower bands of what at first appears to be white flecked with reds, blues and greens, but all the other

Susan Fortgang, Signal, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 841/2 × 661/8 × 11/2 in.

colors are themselves located in horizontal bands that flicker through occluding subsequent layers. Two wide bands of white sit outside the central black pairs setting up an optically dazzling contrast that makes it hard get a handle on the space of the painting. It’s a plaid of chromatic extremes, artificial, like the colors of party balloons or electrical wires, but its structure holds. Light seems to come from behind, or underneath like streaked film or illuminated tenement windows.

1977 turns out to be a watershed year for Fortgang, as she was to have a two-person exhibit with Cora Cohen and two of her paintings were curated into another important group show. Her painting moves quickly from the roughly consolidated, but still somewhat open-ended Signal to a process and image that finally implicates weaving directly, that of

both textiles and basketry. The interweaving of evenly spaced bands in Gadfly (1977) and In the Tradition (1977) is clearly grid-based, but it presents enough of a patterned image that John Perrault included them in his seminal survey from the same year, Pattern Painting, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. One of the first things we notice about both paintings in the context of “Pattern Painting” is that there really isn’t an “image” pattern at all in them, as one might find in the work of Kim MacConnel, Cynthia Carlson, Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, and Robert Zakanitch, among many others in the show. Fortgang’s paintings do have color variations in their more uniform grids and the reference to weaving is obviously there, but they don’t go as far in returning a systemic abstract ordering to sequences of a repeated representational image. The color shifts in

Installation view of Susan Fortgang / Cora Cohen, SoHo Center for Visual Artists, New York, NY, 1977.

Postcard for Pattern Painting, curated by John Perrault at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, November 14 –December 4, 1977. Exhibition #101, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

Susan Fortgang, In the Tradition, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 36 in.

Schapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the narrower vertical bands divide her canvases into three larger chromatic verticals: yellow, green and an exquisitely un-decorative violet pink in Gadfly; In the Tradition’s light blue, yellow, and another weird, cooler, flat light violet that resolves nothing, but seems to exist in an early cyber-dream (the hilariously fat-pixeled aliens of the Space Invaders video game were to land in arcades only a year later). This uncanny chromatic effect is intensified by the evenly spaced, wider black weft bands that run through each painting. Where the vertical bands of color cluster together the horizontal black sequences consolidate into simple ideograms like the eyelets and a cruder version of Saltillo textile diamonds. The black bands almost function as a ground color, but for the flickering white interstices of exposed modeling paste ground left over from the taping, covering and pulling process. Even as the impasto black bands emphasize the objecthood of the

canvases by wrapping around the sides, the flickering white still invokes the backlighting of a projected film strip, recalling the staccato flickering in Sharits’s projected film strips from the sixties, which seem to put grids into rhythmic motion.

Within a year Fortgang had refined her woven grids into narrower intervals spread over larger areas, giving her the ability to create larger, concentric diamonds in pulsating variable widths, as in Tequila Sunrise, 1978 (pl. 6) and Radiating Diamond with Red & Gold, 1978 (pl. 13). In the latter painting a warm flat green almost edges out the uncovered white as the ground color, optically mixing with the vertical red and yellow, and the black horizontal bands in a systemic painting version of a pointillist haze. The flecks of white that remain add an enlivening, liminal glinting. The heavy impasto of the banding in the grid paintings from both years reinforces the apprehension

Installation view of Paul Sharits, Dream Displacement, Greene Naftali, New York, 2015. Courtesy the estate of Paul Sharits and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

of the image as a concrete result of a determinative physical process, with the pleasure of that physicality and the ultimate surprise of completed color arrangements as the frisson, the igniting pleasure that draws the viewer in to an empathetic experience with the artist. You could say that the rough materiality of these paintings is a residue of the expressionism from which Fortgang was otherwise seeking to distance herself. In an interview in front of her work at Eric Firestone Gallery, she spoke of her desire to put the “performative” aspect of expressionism behind her when she started going full bore with the more conceptual process of masking and taping off layers of color to be revealed later. 1 But she was never going to let us forget the physicality of what she was doing.

As the diamonds became more pronounced in Fortgang’s compositions they became, in effect, images. The centralized diamond patterns lock into

the square or rectangle by quartering it through their own perpendicular bisection and introduce to the grid the animating effect of the diagonal. Diamond with Black & Red, 1980 (pl. 7) is the last and the largest of the “woven” paintings in this show and in it we can see that it is the most openly evocative of woven textiles of the group, and that the diagonals in the slopes of the central diamond have been extended into explicit linear networks of black zigzags against red in the field beyond the diamond’s perimeter. The DNA of those zigzags traces a lineage back in time to their gestural ancestors inscribed into Interior with Red & Green and Interior with Black & Red. Now, however, they are more firmly geometric and bestowed with a physicality that goes beyond fabric, verging on stone, like the geometric brick patterns in the walls of the Zapotec site of Mitla. Paint is colored clay, after all, and the strata of Fortgang’s weaving-through-masking allows a rough

Detail of stonework at Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico. Zapotec culture, 13th Century. Courtesy The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

Detail of Susan Fortgang, Diamond with Black & Red, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 66 in.

depth to each color wherein it is possible to see under-colors subtending the surface from the side. It would be fascinating to see her paintings from this period installed next to a mid-seventies Ralph Humphrey and an Alfred Jensen, to emphasize the auratic power of their thicker paint as a vehicle for their distinct imagery.

Fortgang introduces a wider planar dynamism in her work from 1981, setting the foundation for the polychromatic contrast of layers that has been the hallmark of her painting up to the present. She started “carving” (by inlaying then cutting into and pulling up both narrower and wider bands of tape) into broader sheets of color laid across an underlying grid. Giving the wider central diamond a triangular base and crown produces an amphora design that sends patterned diagonals produced by the narrower bands marching into the surrounding, broader color overlay. From a distance these bands read as the dark, leaded mullions of stain glass windows, but closer inspection reveals the dark to be exposed

underpainting. The sense of illumination is amplified by her introduction of a measured amount of metallic pigment into the top layer. The mixture produces a slight iridescence rather than a tacky acrylic imitation of a metallic sheen, just enough to catch us off guard for a moment, as though we’re seeing more light than we should. This effect is particularly pronounced in a small painting, Amphora with Gold, 1981 (pl. 9).

Over the next eleven years, between 1983 and 1994, Fortgang engages in some experimentation, going into packed, gridded arrangements of squares on their diamond axis that are reminiscent of Max Bill and Victor Vasarely titled Geometrics, even engaging in wild, almost windblown asymmetric compositions. In 1989 her work was included in a three-person exhibit at Pratt Institute, with Jenny Snider and Miriam Beerman. All three women were underrepresented veteran painters and their work was distinct from each other, with Snider and Beerman in the representationally expressionist camp and Fortgang’s charting a course from her Abstract Expressionism of the

Installation view of Three Painters’ Paths, Pratt Institute, Higgins Hall Galleries, Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

mid-sixties through to her decidedly more systemic paintings of the mid-eighties. The Pratt show was to be her last exhibition with a significant number of works until now.

The current exhibition at Eric Firestone Gallery picks her production up in 1994 with three smallish vertical canvases, Dowager, Shogun, and Inside Outside. All three are 36 × 18 inches, double squares in proportion. They vertically mirror their interlocking central diamonds and corner triangles in a

manner reminiscent of Native American parfleche designs, but with a palette that reminds me of Max Beckmann’s vertical café paintings: striking yellows and blues and bright warm reds set against rich blacks. In a parfleche the hide is a light ground shining through the negative space. No such white or off white exists in Fortgang’s paintings at this point. It’s color all the way down, establishing a warm, nocturnal chromatic interiority. Note that the process really hasn’t changed; it remains taping, painting, drawing,

Unknown artist, Parfleche, c. 1880, 281/4 × 151/2 × 41/2 in. Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. The Donald Danforth Jr. Collection, Gift of Mrs. Donald Danforth Jr. Susan Fortgang, Inside Outside, 1994, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 18 in.

cutting with knife, pulling up and revealing. Despite the artist’s foresight reinforced through repetition, the reveal is always a surprise.

Jumping ahead eleven years to 2005, are three paintings from a series called “Black Diamonds,” Dahlia (of course), Jasper, and Stargazer (pls. 21–23). In these paintings the broader layer of color is black and the underlying grid of bands, true to the first “woven” grids of 1977–78, reminds that it is still there, and not just as a vibrating under strata (as if that were simple enough). The black shapes, concentrically arranged diamonds, triangles and compound shapes radiating from the center, along with swelling and tapering V-like bands all separate as the masked-off negative spaces are pulled up to reveal the energetic grid underneath. The borders of each overall design stop a little further from the edge of the canvas, so that the regimental stripes of the gridded banding are seen clearly at the border and wrap around the sides of the canvas in a tight, physical grip. The geometric designs recall Deco florets and masks, and the paintings fairly hum with their dark, optical energies.

By 2011–12, Fortgang had traded out the broader planes of black for color: a hot dry red in Tsunami, 2011 (pl. 24), and a thick, almost violet blue in I Put a Spell on You, 2011 (pl. 25). In these paintings, the wider planer shapes are pushed to the corners and the top color narrows to thinner diamond banding in the center so that more of the under grid comes through. These center diamond compositions coupled with the visible under-grid create an unusual compression between right angled perpendicularities and diagonal energies. Fortgang reiterates this juxtaposition in the development of her imagery over the decades since the late seventies, to the point that along with the striking material contrasts of rough edges and planar control in her surfaces we can identify it as a formal thematic in her mature work.

A set of large vertical works, “Zig Zags,” from 2017 are superb examples of how she can add complexities

to her underpainting. In Zig Zag with Turquoise Chevron + Silver Diamonds (pl. 19) the top area planes have reverted to black and the stacked diamonds are squares containing concentric bandings that run at a 45 degree angle to the grids to which we’ve become accustomed. The horizontal bandings are still evident in the areas exposed by the wrapping vertical chevrons. In Zig Zag with Orange Chevron + Silver Diamonds (pl. 20) the banding inside the chevrons follows their internal contour. In all three of the Zig Zag paintings the interior patterns in the shapes form a kind of nesting parquet, and we’re once again reminded of Fortgang’s early practice of the intricacies of Bargello needlepoint.

This exhibition ends on a 2024 painting titled, appropriately enough, Election Anxiety (pl. 26), which is one of an extended series that places an extruded

The artist in her loft, 1973.

vertical equilateral triangle in the center foreground of a shallow track or plaza that is blocked off by a threetiered stage space that could also be undulating corners of urban building grids. The space is as artificial as the sets for the cyberworld movie, Tron. The grids have multiple axes, some entirely divorced from the perpendicular and diagonal axes of the overall rectangle. Fortgang engages in multiple perspectives for the first time, all as shallow as that of proscenium stage, so the illusionist planes toggle back and forth with the concrete physicality of her surface. The palette is of pink, violet, orange and silver, buttressed and overlayed in black, contributing to the unease alluded to in the title.

Fortgang ties the physical resistance of the taping and masking process to political resistance, including the payoff of the final reveal and perhaps there is a clue in her analogy to an explanation of how her work has remained largely out of the public eye until now. She was involved with the artist’s loft movement in the seventies and was a founding member of the Soho Alliance, which fought for tenant’s rights and neighborhood preservation. While always busy in the studio, her life has been largely involved with her community and her marriage. Pursuing an art career is time consuming and it often seems that there are more important things to do, like pursuing the work. As I said above, painting is a long game and sometimes it works out. The full force of Fortgang’s body of work might not have the impact it has now if it had been doled out piecemeal over the last several decades, nor would it have developed as it has. It’s important to note that every shift in imagery chronicled in this survey is tied to a larger body of work. Moreover, there are extended trains of images left out. This exhibition is inevitably and only a first shot across the bow. Stay tuned. ◾

STEPHEN WESTFALL is a painter and writer based between Germantown and New York, NY. His work has been shown in galleries and museums worldwide. He is a professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a recipient of the Rome Prize, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and most recently, the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award.

1 In conversation with Fortgang at Eric Firestone Gallery, January 16, 2025.

The Exhibition

1 Interior with Black & Red, 1966

Oil on canvas

713/8 × 641/8 inches

(detail follows)

Interior with Red & Green, 1966

Oil on canvas

711/8 × 641/8 inches

follows)

Painting with Maroon Bands and Drips, 1975

Acrylic on canvas

831/4 × 653/4 inches

(detail

Rhapsody, 1975

Acrylic on canvas

66 × 841/8 inches

5 Signal, 1977

Acrylic on canvas

841/2 × 661/8 × 11/2 inches

Tequila Sunrise or Radiating Diamond, 1978

Acrylic on canvas

60 × 60 inches

7 Diamond with Black & Red, 1980

Acrylic on canvas

84 x 66 inches

Large Amphora with Blue, 1981

Acrylic on canvas

84 × 66 inches

Amphora with Light Blue, 1981

Acrylic on canvas 24 × 24 inches

Amphora with Green, 1982

Acrylic on canvas 24 × 24 inches

Amphora with Gold, 1981

Acrylic on canvas

24 × 24 inches

Gadfly, 1977

Acrylic on canvas

36 × 36 inches

Radiating Diamond with Red & Gold, 1978

Acrylic on canvas

48 × 48 inches (detail opposite)

Geometrics 4, 1983

follows)

Acrylic on canvas

24 × 24 inches

(detail

Inside Outside, 1994

Acrylic on canvas

36 × 18 inches

Dowager, 1994

Acrylic on canvas

36 × 18 inches

17 Shogun, 1994

Acrylic on canvas

36 × 18 inches

left to right

Zig Zag with Gold + Turquoise Diamonds, 2017

Acrylic on canvas

84 × 24 inches

Zig Zag with Turquoise Chevron + Silver Diamonds, 2017

Acrylic on canvas

84 × 24 inches

Zig Zag with Orange Chevron + Silver Diamonds, 2017

Acrylic on canvas 84 × 24 inches

21 Stargazer, 2005

Acrylic on masonite

20 × 16 inches

Dahlia, 2005

Acrylic on canvas

42 × 30 inches

23 Jasper, 2005

Acrylic on canvas

42 × 30 inches

Tsunami, 2011

Acrylic on canvas

48 × 34 inches

follows)

25 I Put a Spell on You, 2012

Acrylic on canvas

48 × 48 inches

(detail

Election Anxiety, 2024

Acrylic on canvas

66 × 48 inches

The artist, c. 1968.

Susan Fortgang

b. New York, NY, 1944

EDUCATION

SOLO, TWO & THREE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

1968 MFA in Painting, Yale University, New Haven, CT

1966 BFA in Painting, Yale University, New Haven, CT

1965 BA, with honors, Queens College, CUNY

2024 Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

1989 Three Painters’ Paths, Pratt Institute, Higgens Hall Galleries, Brooklyn, NY

1977 Susan Fortgang / Cora Cohen, SoHo Center for Visual Artists, New York, NY

2024

Some Histories, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

Summer Games, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Opening Day Lineup, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Loft Generation: Painting in New York, 1960s–80s, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY

A New York Minute, Eric Firestone Gallery, West Palm Beach, FL

Fall Season 2024, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

2017 Artist-Run, NoHo M55 Gallery, New York, NY

2014 21 & Counting, The Painting Center, New York, NY

2010 Artists Invite Artists: Small Works Invitational, The Painting Center, New York, NY

1996 The Loft Pioneer Show, The Puffin Room, New York, NY

1995 S.O.S. Art Exhibition, 420 West Broadway, New York, NY

1994 Work in Progress, 2/20 Gallery, New York, NY

1992 Europa-America 360, Pino Molica Gallery, New York, NY; Pino Molica Gallery, Rome, Italy

1989 Abstract 89, Pleiades Gallery, New York, NY

1985 Exceptions 3: Paper Works, Pratt Manhattan Center, New York, NY

1982 The Destroyed Print (artist-participant in Jeff Way’s collaborative project), Pratt Manhattan Center, New York, NY

Annual Holiday Invitational Exhibition, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

Twenty-four x Twenty-four, Park West Gallery, Southfield, MI

1981 Heresies Annual Benefit Exhibition, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY

Twenty-four x Twenty-four, H. Pelham Curtis Gallery, New Caanan Library, CT

1980 The Thirteen Collection, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

(continued)

TEACHING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1979 Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, NY

Twenty-four x Twenty-four, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY

1978 Artists Mobilization for Survival Benefit Auction, Plaza Art Galleries, New York, NY

1977 Pattern Painting, P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY

Preparatory Notes Thinking Drawings, part II, 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University, NY

Contemporary American Painting, Ralph Wilson Gallery, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

1976 Contemporary Reflections 1975–76, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT

Contemporary Painting, Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ

Preparatory Notes — Thinking Drawings, Womancenter, Boulder, CO

1975 Works on Paper, Gallery 641, Washington, D.C.

1974 Chief with Cherries (artist-participant in Jeff Way’s collaborative project), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1990–92 Adjunct Instructor, Department of Art Education, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

1990–92 Director, Saturday Art School, Department of Art Education, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

1980–81 Adjunct Instructor, Department of Fine Arts, College of New Rochelle, NY

1979–82 Adjunct Instructor, Department of Art Education, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

1969–99 Staff Developer for Art, Technology, Literacy, PS 79, District Ten, Bronx, NY

Jonathan Goodman, “Loft Generation: Painting in New York 1960s–80s, Featuring Naoto Nakagawa at the Eric Firestone Gallery,” Japan Contemporaries. April 11, 2024.

Grace Glueck, “Three Offbeat Shows with a Conceptual Bent,” New York Times November 21, 1982.

Kay Larson, The Destroyed Print New York: Pratt Institute, 1982.

“Many Geeks Get Their Day,” Detroit Free Press March 7, 1982.

Kay Larson, “24 x 24,” The Village Voice, September 24, 1979.

Women Artists Newsletter. Vol. 3, No. 1, May 1977.

April Kingsley, “Opulent Optimism,” The Village Voice. November 28, 1977.

Contemporary Reflections 1975–76. Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1976.

Meryle Secrest, “Galleries: Capturing an Earlier, ‘Unspoiled’ America: Abstract Cool Anti-Eroticism in Brief,” The Washington Post July 26, 1975.

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Susan Fortgang, for sharing your beautiful work with us and trusting us to put together this show. Thanks for your incredible commitment to painting and being a true joy to work with, as well as for all of your help with information and images for this publication. Thank you to Stephen Westfall for writing such a thoughtful, attentive, and illustrative essay for this publication. Thank you to Jenny Snider, Jeff Way, Robert Schecter, and Susan’s many other friends for their support. We are grateful for everyone who assisted with images and generously allowed us to reproduce their artwork: Pat Steir, Hauser & Wirth, Dallas Museum of Art, TX, the estate of Paul Sharits, Greene Naftali, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Allan Shearer, and The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Lastly, thank you to the whole team at Eric Firestone Gallery for making all of this happen!

— Eric Firestone

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between January 15 – March 1, 2025 on view at Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY

ISBN: 979-8-9885944-6-8

LCCN: 2025900765

Cover: Detail of Zig Zag with Orange Chevron + Silver Diamonds, see pl. 20

Inside front and back covers: Details of Gadfly, see pl. 12

Frontispiece: The artist in her Greene Street loft studio, 1974

Artist’s portrait, p.14: The artist at Eric Firestone Gallery, 2025

All historical images, unless otherwise noted: Courtesy the artist

Eric Firestone Press

Reproduction of contents prohibited

Published by Eric Firestone Press

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

Principal: Eric Firestone

Managing Partner: Kara Winters

Senior Director: Jennifer Samet

Associate Director: Maddy Henkin

Research Assistant: Alabel Chapin

Photography: Sam Glass

Design: Isabelle Smeall

Printing: GHP

Eric Firestone Gallery

40 Great Jones Street New York, NY 10012

646-998-3727

4 Newtown Lane East Hampton, NY 11937

631-604-2386

Ericfirestonegallery.com