Susan Dorothea White Bibliography

Extract: Susan Dorothea White, an internationally exhibited painter and sculptor from Australia whose work is in The National Gallery, among other prestigious public and private collections, explores the most intimate experiences of her life, as well as more topical subjects, in meticulously limned acrylic paintings on wood panels. Her a­ bility to examine unflinchingly such personal milestones as her surgery for a benign brain tumor with a dazed self-portrait in a vertiginously askew hospital setting results in some of the most emotionally jarring narrative imagery in recent art. However, her work can also be informed by an appealing lightheartedness, as seen in her whimsical picture of her professorial husband suspended in mid-air with a book seeming to take flight, like a startled bird, from his hands. She is also a strong social satirist, particularly in paintings such as "The Crowning with Sexism", which combines iconographic images of Marilyn Monroe and Joe Di Maggio with a composition borrowed from Hieronymus Bosch. (Andrew Margolis)