Susan Grabel

by Robert Sievert

In the past few years there has been a shift in her artistic directions. She has taken on the issue of feminism in a bold and striking manner. Her new work examines the female image as it is, not idealized, not glamorized, but projected as real and truthful account of the display of female anatomy subject to the effects of aging, childbearing and gravity.

Like the early paleolithic fertility figures exemplified by the "Venus of Willendorf" and the "Venus of Les Puge" these are seminal concepts of femininity. Nothing idealized or fanaticized. They are women as they are, curvaceous, sagging and ample.

Grabel's new figures are sculpted in clay and then cast in paper. Varying in size from figurines about six inches in height, to full figured woman slightly over life sized. Her method is to first realize the figure in clay and then to cast it in paper, producing fragile yet striking and elegant torsos. There are no heads or extremities. Form is identity.

Pushing even further, she has compressed her paper figures and now is printing them as collographs. The condensed figures read as elegant singular images of femininity.

The photographs that accompany this essay are from a recent visit to her studio. Her sculptures line her walls and fill her cabinets. There is a wonderful accumulation of work.