Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Nocturnes, a solo exhibition of paintings by Susanna Coffey. Coffey is well known for her ongoing series of self-portraits. She has simultaneously developed a practice of painting outdoors at night. These tiny nightscapes include images from Chicago, Connecticut, Prague and other places and date from 1995 to 2012. They are painted either in oil or acrylic, often on small canvas panels. Jeremy Biles writing for the website New City Art, described how Coffey’s “…landscapes in oil are unpopulated, quiet, and diminutive, sometimes just the size of an index card. They carry all the emotion of her portraits but lack fore-grounded faces, and they also convey something at once more abstract and affecting.”

Susanna Coffey expresses her view of our world in the evening—when the sun goes down, but illumination does not cease. The depth of her palette evokes the aura of night—and the degree of darkness changes based on location. Coffey captures both the saturation of dusk in the country and the eternal halo of light in the city. Though Coffey’s Nocturnes are looser and more painterly than her large self-portraits, as Biles observes, “these paintings draw viewers in for closer inspection, engendering the intimacy of a face-to-face encounter. In this series, Coffey demonstrates that darkness is not so much an absence of light as a quality of color, tone and energy; the night reveals a world of temperatures and textures all its own.” In addition to the Nocturnes, the exhibition will include one of the artist’s self-portraits, Day for Night, 2004. Coffey represents herself in front of an image of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city beginning to burn. Her image is reflected in a blue mirror, her eyes closed as if she was dreaming amidst a damaged world.

Susanna Coffey is the F.H. Sellers Professor of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a past recipient of The Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Funds Purchase Award from the American Academy of !Arts and Letters and has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial! Foundation Fellowship and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. This is her first exhibition at steven harvey fine art projects.