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Sue Bartfield is a painter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though Sue is not an “outsider” artist in strict sense of the term—she holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, and has benefitted from extensive formal training—her artistic practice cannot be reduced to a set of legible influences, or understood in relation to the contemporary art scene. Rather, for decades, and often at a distance from the goings on of the art world, Sue has been persistently mapping an altogether unique aesthetic universe.

 

Across styles, propelled by evolving formal interests, the unity of that universe lies, above all, in the intricate density of surface, and resulting destabilization of the boundary between positive and negative space. Depth, in Sue’s interminably layered paintings—does not disappear. Rather, it is rendered profoundly indeterminate, converted into a set of relations between background and foreground that is reconstituted each time a painting is seen from a new perspective. At times, Sue's paintings seem to approach unassimilable visual chaos; at the razor's edge of such chaos, however, the meticulously intuitive order of those paintings is realized, and endlessly realizable in the participatory gaze of the viewer.