Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.