Susan Bee's 'Criss Cross' Exhibition at Accola Griefen Gallery Explores Image and Longing

Susan Bee's exhibition 'Criss Cross' ran from May 23 to June 29, 2013 at Accola Griefen Gallery in New York City. The show featured paintings that reject postmodern irony through sincere engagement with imagery. Bee's work employs sequential narration, modernist color, and intertextual references to Hollywood films and 19th-century European painting. Specific paintings include 'Out the Window' (2011), 'No Exit' (2012), 'Drive She Said' (2011), 'Trouble Ahead' (2012), 'The Trip' (2012), 'Voyage' (2012), 'Wherever You Go' (2013), and 'Ruckenfigur' (2013). Her visual vocabulary explores tension between image shallowness and lived experience depth. Bee references cinematic techniques like rear projection from 1940s-1950s Hollywood, embracing illusion's expressive potential rather than masking cinematic untruth. The paintings reanimate historical pathos through contemporary feeling, with works derived from Caspar David Friedrich and Chaim Soutine. Friedrich's 1830 painting 'Sonnenuntergang (Brüder)' serves as source material for 'Ruckenfigur', transformed through vigorous color patterns. Bee's approach contrasts with Roy Lichtenstein's graphic treatment of art historical references and differs from Action Painting's experience focus or Pop Art's object dominion. The gallery address was 547 West 27th Street #634 in New York City.