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York’s work is about sensual experience and physical perception. She is attuned to the subtle changes that our bodies make in response to what we see and feel in the environment. At Del Deo & Barzune, she used the entire gallery, placing each sculpture in precise relation to the geometry of the room and to each other. Standing anywhere in the space revealed sight lines that stitched the work together…

The work might first strike one as Minimalist and literal, but it soon sheds those associations and becomes something else, a meditation on time, landscape, and architecture. Like the sculptures, their sensual surfaces bring sight and touch together without favoring either. York’s devotion to exactness does something I did not expect. Walking back and forth in the corridor…

Susan York’s career has evolved over several decades and, in many ways, constitutes an ongoing investigation into materials, process, and site specificity. For the past several years, York has worked with graphite in two and three dimensions. Often, she will translate her drawings into three dimensions, or vice versa, in order to experience how perceptions of size ...

At first glance, the seriality and rigor of York's work evoke Minimalist forebears: Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Donald Judd. Yet as Lucy Lippard points out in the exhibition's catalogue essay, York wittily subverts minimalism's commitment to systemic composition and impersonal facture.We learn that the sculptures' perfectly smooth surfaces, which suggest industrial fabrication...

York's site-sensitive installations of graphite forms, both sculpted and drawn, engage the existing architecture of a chosen site: a room, a wall, or a piece of paper. Her studies in graphite are a reverent homage to subtlety, with irregularities interrupting otherwise austere geometric forms and producing results that are perhaps more felt than seen. In the exhibition catalogue...

Susan York: Carbon is a stimulating way to re-experience works by Georgia O’Keeffe in dialogue with a contemporary artist. The context is a new, museum-wide presentation of O’Keeffe’s art — A Great American Artist. A Great American Story — which considers her from multiple perspectives in galleries separated by themes such as Abstract Nature ...

Susan York is heir to decades of “post minimalism,” but unlike so many of her peers in earlier and later generations, she has found a way to paradoxically revitalize this ongoing “ism.” I say “paradoxically” because the original Minimalism, at least in theory, heartily disavowed vitality in favor of stasis. York, on the other hand, subtly and studiously makes her ...

Susan York is a New Mexico-based artist who has been showing small sculptural pieces as well as spare large-scale installations in the Minimalist vein for over 20 years. Her striking body of work and systematic methods—influenced by the Con-structivist and De Stijl movements as well as ancient Greek premises of geometry—adroitly provoke tensions…

Most of the time one doesn’t think of painting as volume, because a volume implies a third dimension. But on touring the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s winter show, Susan York: Carbon (January 21-April 17. 2016), it was easy to submit to a sense of pleasurable dislocation imparted when works of two dimension meet works of three, as in the meeting of O’Keeffe paintings and Susan York’s graphite ...

It might be tempting to write this work off as a late reprise of classic Minimalism, in the mode of John McCracken—that is, as a younger New Mexican artist bowing to a local master. But where McCracken’s Minimalism was largely about visible form and perceptual presence, York’s work is centrally about a concealed materiality. You can’t just look at her columns ...

Imagine Ellsworth Kelly’s shapes and colors married to Sol LeWitt’s wooden forms, miniaturize both, and you have some idea of Susan York’s new work. Her show is modest but engaging—nine small wall sculptures, each measuring between three and eight inches, that address issues of proportion, color, repetition, and movement. Each sculpture is composed of...

I first saw the artist Agnes Martin lecture in 1982 in Albuquerque. She said: ‘‘My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.’’ I thought she was speaking directly to me. It took me a year to find the courage to call her. I wrote out a script of what I would say and laid my yellow legal pad with the dialogue printed in blue ink in front…

Susan York represents a new generation of minimalist sculptors. While her formal vocabulary of columns, beams and slabs is heavily indebted to such artists as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, John McCracken, Ronald Bladen and Richard Serra, her choice of graphite as a material (cast solid, kiln-fired, shaped into irregular geometric forms with saws and files, then hand-polished) ...

York’s pieces are made powerful by the control that she exercises over them. Viewing her work, it is clear that you are in the presence of something to be taken seriously, as small or as simple as it appears to be. One of York’s graphite cubes mounted to the wall (even one as small as four by four inches) has a preternatural pull, almost like a specific ...

A strict constructionist view of the legacy of Minimalist art might find York's solid graphite objects to be antithetic to Minimalist principles. York's graphite modules operate apart from any grid. Their willful placement, ending inches from the floor or wedged high up on a gallery wall, are unabashedly illusive and expressive. While somehow they achieve the kind of literal ...