steven harvey fine art projects presents Autofiction, an exhibition of paintings by Susan Lichtman. Some of the pieces were included at Lichtman’s recent show at the Rose Art Museum, in an exhibition celebrating her forty-two year career at Brandeis University. The show, entitled At Home at the Rose, combined Lichtman’s paintings with a group of works selected by the artist from the museum’s permanent collections.
Autofiction is a genre of literature that combines autobiography and invention. Lichtman paints scenes of her household and family, however her works serve a novelistic function instead of a documentary one, creating what she thinks of as fictions, which attempt “mystery and specificity at the same time.” Working from memory to depict her own home “somehow allows for a more resolved image.” These scenes are the emotional result of prolonged meditation; portraits of continuity and change over time rather than immediate snapshots. Lichtman’s practice is situated within a long history of painting domestic interiors, her recognizable motifs of household objects and figures invoke a sense of ease and familiarity. It is her distinct perspective – that of an insider as well as observer – and her autofictive blend of observed truth and imagination that gives the work its singularity.
Working in the intimist traditions of Vuillard and Bonnard, Lichtman is a subtle and skillful colorist, creating complex harmonies on a large scale. She states, “to me, close-valued color is magical. It’s a way for the paint to imply the fiction of light and air. A palette of close values also gives the picture a kind of envelope into which everything is placed.”
Lichtman received her BA in Studio Art at Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from Yale. She has taught at Brandeis University since 1980, and in 2019 was named the Charles Bloom Chair in the Arts of Design. Lichtman was the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Fellowship in 2018, the Theodore and Jane Norman Award for Faculty Research in 2017, and was a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Her work was included in two group shows at SHFAP in 2023, as well as a show at the Natalie Karg Gallery and a solo exhibition at Fahrenheit Madrid in 2022.
