Suspended States: Inside Ribana Szutor’s Suspended She: Inner Tensions
- Art Dealer Street
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
At Alessandro Berni Gallery, Suspended She: Inner Tensions unfolds as a quiet but emotionally charged solo exhibition by Ribana Szutor. On view from May 21 through May 31, 2026, at 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea, the exhibition brings together a body of work that asks the viewer to slow down, remain with the image, and enter a space of uncertainty.
Szutor’s paintings do not offer direct explanations. They move between abstraction and figuration, between body and surface, between what is visible and what remains hidden. A female presence appears throughout the exhibition, but never as a fully fixed subject. She emerges, dissolves, returns, and disappears again into the painted field.
In this exhibition, the figure is not the final subject. Tension is.
A Painting That Asks for Suspension
The title Suspended She: Inner Tensions immediately establishes the emotional structure of the exhibition. “Suspended” suggests a pause, a held moment, a condition between movement and stillness. It is fragile, charged, and unresolved.
This feeling shapes the entire experience of the show. Szutor does not create paintings that can be quickly read. Instead, she constructs surfaces that hold the viewer in a state of attention. The works resist immediate understanding. They ask the eye to slow down, to search, and to stay with what is uncertain.
There is a sense that each painting exists in the middle of a transformation. Forms do not fully arrive. Figures do not fully disappear. The works seem to hold their breath, creating an atmosphere where emotion becomes visible, but never fully declared.
The Female Presence as Fragment
A female presence moves through the exhibition, but she is never shown as complete or stable. She appears through suggestion: a trace of the body, a partial outline, a movement within the surface, or a presence felt more than seen.
This gives the work much of its emotional force. Szutor is not interested in presenting the figure as something to be decoded. Instead, the female presence becomes part of a larger inner landscape. She is suspended within the painting, caught between appearance and disappearance.
The body and the surface seem to absorb one another. At moments, the figure rises from the composition. At others, she is almost fully taken back into abstraction. This movement creates a quiet tension between visibility and concealment, presence and absence.
In Suspended She: Inner Tensions, the female figure is not simply represented. She becomes a condition.
Inner Cartographies
Szutor’s surfaces unfold through layered textures, tonal shifts, and fine visual movements. These surfaces often feel like fragments of a map, but not one that points to a physical place. They suggest an inner cartography, a geography of emotion, memory, and psychological movement.
The paintings do not describe recognizable landscapes. Instead, they create emotional territories. Layers appear torn, reassembled, hidden, and revealed. The surface becomes a record of pressure, movement, and change.
What emerges is a geography without borders. The viewer is not guided toward a single meaning. Instead, they are placed inside a field of feeling, where the image shifts depending on how long one looks.
Color, Surface, and Movement
Color plays an essential role in Szutor’s practice. It is not used simply to decorate the surface or define form. In these works, color becomes a living material. It builds depth, rhythm, and emotional intensity.
Tonal variations create movement across the canvas, while surface vibrations allow forms to remain open and unsettled. The colors seem to breathe through the paintings, creating an energy that is both intimate and expansive.
This use of color gives the exhibition its emotional pulse. The viewer is drawn not only to what the paintings show, but to how they feel. Color becomes a way of carrying emotion without turning it into a direct narrative.
In Szutor’s work, color does not explain. It evokes.
Between Abstraction and Figuration
One of the strongest qualities of the exhibition is its refusal to settle fully into either abstraction or figuration. Szutor allows both languages to remain in tension. The figure appears, but abstraction interrupts it. The surface expands, but the body leaves its trace.
This unresolved space gives the paintings their complexity. They are not purely abstract, because the body remains present. Yet they are not traditionally figurative, because the body is never allowed to become fully stable.
Instead, the works remain in a state of becoming. A shape may begin to suggest a figure, only to dissolve into texture and color. A surface may appear abstract, only to reveal the feeling of a body beneath it.
This balance creates a visual experience that is personal, open-ended, and deeply atmospheric.
Painting as an Emotional State
The central idea of Suspended She: Inner Tensions is that painting does not need to describe a place. It can behave like a state.
Szutor’s paintings do not function as windows onto an outside world. They operate as emotional environments. They hold pressure, softness, uncertainty, and transformation within the surface.
The viewer does not simply stand outside the work and observe it. The viewer enters slowly, through the movement of the eye and the accumulation of feeling. Texture, color, and form come together to create an atmosphere of suspended intensity.
This makes the exhibition less about explanation and more about experience. The paintings do not ask to be solved. They ask to be crossed.
An Experience That Lingers
At Alessandro Berni Gallery, Suspended She: Inner Tensions becomes more than a presentation of individual paintings. It creates an environment. The works speak to one another through mood, surface, color, and tension, forming a concentrated space of emotional reflection.
The exhibition’s strength comes from its restraint. Nothing is over-explained. Nothing fully settles. Szutor allows the paintings to remain unresolved, and this unresolved quality becomes the heart of the show.
What lingers after viewing the exhibition is not a single image, but a feeling: a sense of pause, pressure, and emotional movement held within color and texture.
In the end, Suspended She is not a figure to be decoded. It is a condition to be crossed. You can learn more about Ribana Szutor and Alessandro Berni Gallery via these links:
Ribana Szutor: Website / Portfolio: Ribana Szutor Instagram: @szutor_ribana_artist Artsy: Suspended She: Inner Tension - Ribana Szutor
Alessandro Berni Gallery: Website: Alessandro Berni Gallery Instagram: @alessandrobernigallery Artsy: Alessandro Berni Gallery
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