SUZAN FRECON — Paintings, Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1999

A slim hardcover catalogue in an illustrated paper dust jacket, from the year before Suzan Frecon’s paintings stopped looking like this. A single broad brushstroke in oxblood runs across the upper third of the jacket, her name set small and grey beneath it. The back is left entirely blank.

Published on the occasion of The Form Carries the Purpose of Illumination, Frecon’s solo exhibition at Häusler Kunst Projekte, Munich, October 1998 to February 1999. Christa Häusler, the art historian who ran the gallery with her husband Wolfgang — later renamed Häusler Contemporary — edited the book herself: the same gallerist who had just given Frecon the wall.

John Yau began looking at Frecon’s work in 1975, the year he arrived in New York, one year after she took the raw Thomas Street loft whose extraordinary natural light became fundamental to her painting. She had no gallery. Twenty-four years later, he wrote the essay for this book.

Then things begin to move.

The Whitney included Frecon in its Biennial the following year. Yau interviewed her for The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. In 2008, the Menil Collection presented what its own literature described as the first major exploration of her work, the same year David Zwirner began representing her. She returned to the Whitney Biennial in 2010. Yau was still there: writing about her for Hyperallergic in 2017 and contributing the essay to her David Zwirner monograph in 2020, twenty-one years after this one.

By then he was describing Frecon as having slowly moved into a territory recognisably her own. This book sits immediately before that consolidation.

The plates explain why. Inside are stepped and interlocking rectangles in blue, dark green, deep red and gold leaf: hard-edged, architectural, often multipart, each reproduced alone on an otherwise empty page without caption or interruption. It is a different vocabulary from the reductive, curved, earth-red paintings for which Frecon is now immediately recognisable, her work subsequently entering the collections of the National Gallery of Art, MoMA, the Whitney and the Menil.

The paintings weren’t simple yet. The pages already were.

This is not a retrospective publication produced once the history had settled around her. It catches Frecon at the threshold: after decades of sustained work, immediately before the Whitney, before the Menil, before Zwirner, with a critic who had already been watching for almost a quarter of a century and would continue doing so for decades more.

Hardcover with illustrated paper dust jacket · approx. 23 × 18 cm · 56 pages · 21 colour reproductions · German / English · First edition · Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1999 · ISBN 978-3-933807-01-4

Condition: Very good. Small chip to the dust jacket at the head of the spine, with light overall toning consistent with age. Plates and text block clean.