Becky Suss

The art of Becky Suss, who chronicles interiors and landscapes, examining space, nostalgia, class, and the transporting nature of art and decorative objects

Becky Suss (b. Philadelphia, PA in 1980; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) explores ideas of intimacy, domesticity and memory. Her large-scale paintings of interiors are holistic representations of the sensory and remembered qualities of space, while her small paintings of objects and books become a library of charged personal items.

Devoid of figures, Suss’ style uses flattened architecture, exaggerated proportions, and distorted perspective to amplify the tension between the factual and the fictitious, mirroring the plasticity of memory, continually reformed and revised. What resonates is how a dwelling, despite its rigid physical structure, can adapt, welcoming the day to-day histories, eccentricities, and impressions of the people who move between its walls.

Suss’ work often questions the stereotypes of domesticity especially as they relate to the lives of women in America. She is fascinated by American culture’s dismissal and dependence on homemaking and homemakers, and inspired by her own personal heritage, the generations of women in her family who managed the domestic sphere without recognition. She aspires to elevate these historically female private spaces that have long been dismissed as unimportant, though in reality are places where family and identity are created and defined. She often draws inspiration from memories of her own grandparents’ home and, after becoming a parent herself, she has found inspiration through returning to the literature of her childhood and the memories of these imagined narratives.