Michael R. Chisolm in Susanne Kessler and The Evolution of Line

Line’s ascendancy, in all of its manifestations, characterizes the vast range  of Susanne Kessler’s work- in the works on paper, collages, paintings, sculpture, and installations. It is not merely the spatial implications of her line, but its transformative nature that ties the vast body of work together. This is a line that reveals and informs the unseen- as in the pieces based on the middle ear and brain cells. It is one that forms grids that begin on paper, appear on canvas as the basis of composition, and wind up in the three dimensions, taking baroque twists and turns along the way ...

These installations, with their radical curvilinear movement, presage the recent installations in that she has, to an extent, miniaturized these torques and rendered them with, more intricacy. This development from the large scale or installation of painted canvas to the current work, which generally rejects chroma, parallels the multi layered development of her art overall. This shift from the large scale baroque gestures and space to the more intricate tendril forms is the essence of Kessler´s continued concern with ideas of evolution and layers of time. Kessler´s development reverses evolution -and thus time- as the work moves from large scale, space-encompassing pieces to smaller microscopic works.