Face Picture III

Suellen Rocca’s monochromatic drawings emphasize the formal importance of patterning, repetition, and flatness in her work. The theatrical composition is typical of Chicago Imagists Roger Brown and Philip Hanson (who exhibited in False Image at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1968 and 1969), and Art Green and Jim Nutt (participants in the Hairy Who group shows with Rocca beginning in 1966). Yet the confrontational façade-like treatment of a face in this pencil drawing, together with the shape of the mouth, suggest that Rocca had the work of other Chicago Imagists specifically in mind: Ed Paschke’s monumental portraits in the 1970s and 1980s (see Smart Museum 1978.169, 1992.22) and Karl Wirsum’s figures inspired by the two-dimensional design in the indigenous arts of the American southwestern and Mesoamerica (see 1992.24.)
Face Picture III of 1982 appears to rework some of her earlier theatrical motifs (see 2001.391) while another drawing dating from c. 1980 by Rocca illustrates a softer approach to patterning, repetition, flatness, and symmetry (see 2001.392). In the 1980s she turned away from the pop cultural imagery rendered in playful or enigmatic terms in her earlier works (see 2001.389), and towards figurative painting featuring archetypal Surrealist imagery.