Sue Fuller: Drawing in String
Opening: Thursday, 11 September | 6–8pm
Richard Saltoun Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition dedicated to American artist Sue FULLER (1914–2006), focusing on her innovative string compositions produced between the 1950s and 1980s. The exhibition traces the evolution of Fuller’s singular visual language through a selection of her key three-dimensional works, situated at the intersection of material experimentation and spatial design, which pushed the boundaries of modernist abstraction.
Trained at the Art Students League in New York and later at Black Mountain College under the Bauhaus master, Josef Albers, Fuller was deeply influenced by early exposure to European modernism and constructivism. Her time printmaking at Atelier 17, under the direction of Stanley William Hayter, further shaped her interest in structure, repetition, and the potential of line beyond the page. By the 1950s, she had transitioned away from two-dimensional prints to develop her most distinctive works—string constructions intricately embedded within clear lucite frames, creating delicate yet rigorously composed three-dimensional geometries suspended in space.
At once architectural and ephemeral, these works challenge distinctions between art and craft, drawing on Fuller’s lifelong engagement with textile traditions and new technologies. As a woman working in a male-dominated field, Fuller deliberately embraced materials and processes historically associated with the domestic sphere, reframing them within a formalist context and acting as a deliberate counterpoint to the improvisational gestures of Abstract Expressionism. Her work reflects a deeply personal yet analytically precise exploration of tension, transparency, and perception.
Though Fuller’s contribution to postwar abstraction has often been overshadowed by her male contemporaries, her work was included in significant exhibitions such as Hayter and Studio 17: New Directions in Gravure (1944) and The Responsive Eye (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York - the latter a landmark survey of Op Art and perceptual abstraction. Her string compositions were also featured in Geometric Abstraction in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1962) and Modern Art in the United States, organised by MoMA and shown at Tate (then known as the Tate Gallery) in 1956. In recent years, her practice has received renewed attention for its formal innovation and prescient dialogue with contemporary concerns around materiality, visibility, and the politics of the medium.
Fuller’s work is represented in major museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Tate, UK; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University.
For press enquiries, please email: sonja@richardsaltoun.com