Suzan Frecon's Watercolors and Panels at David Zwirner Explore Abstraction and Materiality

Suzan Frecon's exhibition at David Zwirner in New York City, running from February 13 to March 23, 2013, featured small watercolors and painted panels that engage in a quiet dialogue. The works, displayed at 525 West 19th Street, employ a sparse palette of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and greens to create compositions that balance somber and playful sensations. Frecon uses old handmade Japanese, Chinese, and Indian papers, which contribute a soft, weathered character to pieces like red blue blue (2012), a horizontal watercolor on Indian paper that blurs formal binaries. Her process is highly deliberative, as seen in painting plan drawing for a large painting (2004), which reveals a premeditated approach with pencil grids. While some compositions, such as horizontally extended orange (patched) (2011), feel expansive, others with shapes not reaching the paper's edge can seem restrictive. Frecon's imagery avoids associations, drawing comparisons to Minimalists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, though her work is noted for greater emotional breadth. The exhibition's spiritual quality and purposeful tensions offer a peaceful, optimistic experience.