Susan Weil Graces SF With Seven Decades of Dazzling Art

It’s difficult to compete with the view from COL Gallery, which looks out from Ghirardelli Square to Aquatic Cove, Alcatraz and a sparkling San Francisco Bay. But if any artist’s up to the task, it’s Susan Weil, whose mini-retrospective in the one-and-a-half-year-old gallery provides a dazzling survey of seven decades of painting, collage and mixed media work.

Weil, who lives in New York and turns 95 later this month, doesn’t fit within a particular art historical narrative — or rather, not just one particular narrative. Instead, she flits in and out of different movements and associations, mostly doing her own thing despite prevailing or commercial trends, and doing it very well.

Her earliest piece in the show, Collage Figure (1966), is a combination of photographic images and acrylic paint, a horizontal spread of women’s bodies radiating rainbow-hued waves behind a slick plexi surface. Like all of the work in this show, the nearly 60-year-old piece is remarkably well preserved; it looks like it could have been made yesterday.

The multimedia collage is also indicative of Weil’s fragmented approaches to come. In the show’s 13 works, bodies break up or blur into constituent parts and spread across multiple canvases. Painted paper and canvas curves, crumples and hangs in elegant, three-dimensional shapes.

The show opens with a work that seems made for its current San Francisco setting, despite the title of Munich Birds (1989). Made with eight pieces of paper pinned high on the gallery wall, it depicts three birds in flight. One bird’s cut-out wing curls gracefully where it meets the ceiling. Seagull calls from outside add a fitting soundtrack; the whole assemblage seems on the verge of bursting apart like a startled flock.

Similarly appropriate to its temporary home is the multi-canvas piece Swimmers (2008), a watery acrylic painting that perfectly captures the splashy movements of two swimmers, who could easily be the Dolphin Club or South End Rowing Club members paddling back and forth through Aquatic Cove.

Weil’s interest in bodies includes celestial bodies. Three Moons (1990), a simple construction of three ivory-painted canvas circles, drapes like a set of vestments around an absent religious figure. The triptych Sindhind (1977) is a starry night sky marked not by our Milky Way, but a thick arc of crinkled paper. A favorite moment here: when the unpainted, white backside of Weil’s paper reveals itself, looking like a chunk of light knocked through the firmament.

While there’s a bit of “How’d she do this?” with some of Weil’s work, her materials are never illusory, or trying to render themselves invisible. Even if we don’t have the skill to replicate her vivid cyanotype print or a stiff crumpled paper sculpture, we can clearly see how these things are made.

Her long career has been one of material experimentation and daily practice, commitments perhaps encouraged by her early involvement with the alternative art school Black Mountain College. It was Weil who told Robert Rauschenberg (to whom she was married 1950–1953) about the school; they met while taking art classes in Paris. In 1948, they studied under Josef Albers alongside Ruth Asawa (whose first public sculpture, Andrea, is installed at Ghirardelli Square).

Weil’s long bio is filled with legendary spaces (112 Greene Street, P.S. 1) and numerous firsts, including the delightful fact that her second husband, architect Bernard Kirschenbaum, built her the first residential geodesic dome.

While Weil’s practice is well known back east, amazingly, this is her first West Coast solo exhibition, a major coup for the fledgling COL Gallery. As an introduction to her inventive, multifaceted practice, this show is a gratifying one, anchored by Array (1982), a nearly seven-foot-wide painted paper piece in which a hand pulls back what I like to think of as a heavy curtain. Revealing, perhaps, Susan Weil’s long life of artmaking.

‘Susan Weil’ is on view at COL Gallery (887 Beach St., San Francisco) through May 9, 2025.