The Curator's Eye

Humming While You Shop. Susan Dory, Painter

Deliquescent, 2009, acrylic on canvas over panel, 58 x 52 inches

Everybody knows the Bravern in Bellevue is the fanciest new shopping center in the Northwest, a place with couture so haute the dresses constitute exhibits in your personal fashion art collection. But illuminati know that the Neiman Marcus store there doubles as the Eastside’s de facto new gallery for actual art.

It was the store’s legendary mogul Herbert Marcus who made Texas safe for abstract art at the turn of the ’50s, staunchly backing the new and shocking at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art when most folks thought their kids could finger-paint better than Jackson Pollock could splatter. He startled people further by putting art in his stores, collecting paintings as well as clothes.

Now Neiman Marcus has 2,500-plus artworks. New at the Bravern store: the shimmering minimalism of Seattle’s own Susan Dory, a Pollock-Krasner grant recipient and Neddy Award-winner. “She creates complexity in her work through the repetition of a single element,” says Julie Kronick, corporate art curator for Neiman Marcus. “Dory sees the layers of paint as encapsulating moments of time, creating visual documents of her daily practice of painting.”

Minimalists are supposed to be cool, and her acrylic palette is that. But her surfaces are anything but remote and emotionally inert. They’re meant to evoke feeling and memory. For her, daubs of color can trigger the sort of jolt Proust got from a scent that recaptures the past.

Or you could think of Dory’s work as a kind of murmurous soundtrack. As critic Regina Hackett has said, “If Susan Dory’s pulses of paint were translated into sound, they’d hum.” 

To see more Susan Dory:
Neiman Marcus, the Shops at the Bravern
11111 NE 8th St., Bellevue
Winston Wächter Fine Art, 203 Dexter Ave. N., Seattle
susandory.com