Suzanne Perlman

(Hungary, 18/10/1922 - 02/08/2020)

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family of art-dealers and antiquarians, Perlman began assisting in the family’s gallery by sorting postcards featuring the work of master artists, an experience she later described as foundational to her visual consciousness. Describing painting as “at once a sensuous and philosophical process, revealing something about the ancient nature of your soul”, her work is not simply urban scenes depicted in lively colour, but are visual meditations on experience, displacement, belonging and perception.

At the age of 17, Perlman married a businessman with whom she moved to Rotterdam in 1939 before the pair were forced to flee when Germany invaded the following year. Travelling via Paris and Bordeaux to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, she was, at first, faced with language barriers that prevented her from communicating with locals and so expressed her admiration for the island and its people through her art.

Working from a modest studio above the couple’s art and antiques shop in Willemstad, Perlman began to paint markets, sea-bathers, musicians and worshippers of the island’s diverse community, evoking both the exuberance and quiet dignity of daily existence and reflecting both the vitality and intensity of the Fauves and the emotional directness of the Expressionists.

After moving to New York, Perlman began incorporating more Abstract Expressionist principles into her work and studied at the Art Students League and Columbia University where she was able to further refine her synthesis of gestural energy and compositional balance. The success she had here led her to being invited to attend a workshop at the School of Vision in Salzburg with Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, who subsequently invited her to work alongside him in his studio.

Following the death of her husband in 1983, she relocated to London permanently and continued her artistic education at St Martin’s School of Art. Here, the city and its occupants again began her main motif. Transforming the city’s grey palette into opulent harmonies of cobalt, saffron and emerald, she oscillated between representation and abstraction in order to depict the hustle and bustle of urban life with lyrical motion.

Throughout Perlman’s life, her work was exhibited internationally and is now represented in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of London, the Parliamentary Art Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and the Curaçao Museum. From a lifetime of practice, Perlman’s oeuvre exemplifies the migratory modernity of post-war Europe yet refuses to be defined by it. Instead, celebration of human presence within the flux of light and colour emerge as her lasting hallmarks. 

Image: Suzanne Perlman, Nude (1973). Oil on canvas, 126 x 125 cm. Collection of the artist's estate.