This online version of the exhibition Suellen Rocca: In Dreams, The Last Works includes 28 paintings and drawings made in the final two decades of Rocca’s life.

Rocca’s work is deeply personal, even when the images she uses are taken from popular culture. One of the original members of the Hairy Who, the group of six visionary artists who first exhibited together in 1966, her work has influenced several generations of artists.

The torso of a woman holding fish, which is a recurring image in her later work, originates from a dream she had while studying symbolism in the paintings of Max Beckmann. The chair, bed, and table in many of her later works was inspired by a group of doll house furniture from the 1950s that she discovered in her basement.

Rocca’s last two paintings, completed shortly before her untimely death in 2020, show her uniting the images of the torso of a woman with the hieroglyphic, pattern-like drawings that first appeared in her paintings more than 50 years earlier. This impulse to return to her past and to mine a personal lexicon of images is rooted in the artist’s intense desire to look carefully. “What I tell my students now is you need to look,” Rocca said, “because after we think we’ve seen things we don’t look at them anymore.”