SHFAP presents (T)ides, a group show featuring works by Gideon Bok, Gregory Botts, Susanna Coffey, Daniel Herr and Susan Lichtman. These artists play with aspects of representation; blending painterly bravado, bold chroma and a mastery of surface. They are mature practitioners and often committed teachers. The featured works embody a shared process of expanding the perimeters of representational painting; Coffey, Lichtman, Herr, Botts and Bok introduce elements of mythology, memory and time to the tradition of painting of life, resulting in work made in the space between story and reality. 

Susanna Coffey is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and Yale School of Art, and a professor at the Chicago Art Institute and Columbia University. She is best known for her portraiture, which blurs the boundaries between artist, space, and work, as well as her integration of art historical imagery with her own self-portraiture, situating herself within an iconographic framework. In the 1980s, she began a series inspired by the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which tells the story of Hades’ abduction of Persephone, using the text to explore Coffey’s own lived and observed experience of patriarchy. The artist has said that moving away from pure representation offered her “seemingly endless possibilities to show what [she] felt.” Her paintings reference and continue an established narrative tradition, bringing her world into conversation with one which is partially imagined, partially historical. These works operate within a vocabulary of painterly figuration, informed in part by her Yale teacher Lester Johnson.

Coffey’s work has been exhibited in museums including The Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Aldrich Museum, The Hood Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Karamy Museum of Art, Xinjiang, China and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain. She has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at SHFAP, in 2014, 2018 and 2019. 

Gideon Bok lives and works in Maine. He received his BA from Hampshire College and his MFA from Yale University, and has taught at both Hampshire College and Boston University. His work takes the process of painting, particularly from observation in his studio, to an extreme. The work featured in this show, a large diptych view of his studio, shows Bok’s experimentation with accelerated color based on information that is observed but freely extrapolated. The work functions as a palimpsest showing the passage of time; an image of the artist’s children blended with an artists’ skeleton sits at the center while remnants of movement and bodies trail around the doubled space. He has described the process of reflecting movement, saying “if the sitter or person moved, or moved something in the studio, or even if the light changed, the painting had to change in relation to it,” explaining that this act of watching “changes the … painting from a still object to a time-based medium.” Bok has been shown several times at SHFAP, in 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2020. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, in 2005 he was included in The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition where he received the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Fund Purchase Award. 

Gregory Botts is a painter, poet and teacher who studied at the School of Visual Arts in 1970, and has been splitting his time between New York City, California and New Mexico in the years since. He is a self-described figurative and landscape painter, with influences from Paul Georges and Fairfield Porter. Botts includes poetry, philosophy and critical theory in his process, exploring the marriage of the abstract and the concrete by working both from observation and through allegorical interpretation – en plein air and in the studio. He describes an approach to painting as “the mimic of a thought,” saying that to him, “the artist was going into the woods and coming back with a shape, striped and outlined at the surface. A painting was an idea.” He has written a book of poetry entitled clouds, leaves, waves… and his work has been shown across the country, including at the Anne Plumb Gallery, SHFAP, and at the Tony Shafrazi and Salander O’Reilly Galleries. 

Daniel Herr was born in California. The son of a landscape painter, Herr received his BA at UC Davis, and his MFA in painting from Boston University under the tutelage of John Walker. He is a self-described “old-school painter,” with influence from abstract expressionism and the DADA movement. Herr speaks of painting as a record of experience, likening it to a short story, poem or photograph; something which is personal but exists within the conventions of form. After living in New York for years, Herr recently moved to Los Angeles, and his work has been shown at SHFAP, the Java Project, Brooklyn, NY, Greenhouse, Alva, OK, and LAST Projects, Los Angeles, CA. 

Susan Lichtman works with the domestic and the intimate, oftentimes painting her own house and family. This space blends her past and present, as the house she and her husband built sits on land adjacent to the property where she grew up in the woods of southeast Massachusetts. Despite the personal subject, Lichtman is in fact creating what she thinks of as fictions, her paintings serve a novelistic function rather than a purely documentarian one, trying to “get mystery and specificity at the same time.” In painting spaces she is intimately familiar with, Lichtman works from knowledge and recollection in addition to observation, which she says “somehow allows for a more resolved image.” Lichtman received her BA in Studio Art at Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from Yale. She has taught at Brandeis University for decades, and held positions at Hollins University, VA, and the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France as well as various guest teaching positions, visiting art lectures and residencies around the world. Her work has recently been exhibited at SHFAP, in Madrid, Cambridge, MA, Smith College, Northampton, MA, and Gross McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.