Now Showing

Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

The focus of Susan Hensel Gallery is on compelling objects, meaningful use of materials, and engaging sculpture. It is a gallery where experimental ideas and works of the hand join to create unique sensory experiences. Opened September 10th, 2004 Susan Hensel Gallery is a gallery/ workspace presenting 5-6 shows per year in an intimate space, with hardwood floors and high tin ceilings. In 2013 the interior space reverted to a working studio for Susan Hensel where she continues to work on small and largescale artwork that engages both sculptural and cultural space. You can find her current work at www.SusanHenselProjects.com. The Susan Hensel Gallery is now both a large window gallery on Cedar Avenue, a main thoroughfare in south Minneapolis and an online venture represented on Artsy.net.

The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché

The Windows are currently showing Christopher Rowley, a new artist to Susan Hensel Gallery, for his show, The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché.

Running from May 15th, 2022 to July 15th, 2022, The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché is a show of paintings often using traditional rug-making and embroidery techniques to explore both a formal and content-driven relationship with contemporary abstraction. The artist is currently focused on developing abstractions that are derived from. and related to, mechanical components and piping constructs.

Rowley’s new exhibit moves his practice forward, continuing to develop his visual language to communicate these ideas with striking confidence, elan, and a heavy dose of charm.

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Neotectonic Period: A Radical Proposal for Beauty

Susan Hensel Gallery on Artsy.net is exhibiting a new online exclusive show and in-real-life window show from Susan Hensel titled Neotectonic Period: A Radical Proposal for Beauty.

Running from March 15th to May 15th on the Susan Hensel Gallery’s online Artsy platform, the show exhibits the artist’s groundbreaking digital embroidery techniques combined with a variety of materials. Two large works will occupy the windows of the brick-and-mortar Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis at 3441 Cedar Ave S.

The stunning array of objects blends Hensel’s familiar mastery of textile sculpture with many new ideas and approaches.

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Talk To Me

Susan Hensel Gallery is proud to present Minneapolis artist Ingrid Restemayer’s second show with Susan Hensel Gallery:  Talk to Me.

 Running from January 15th, 2022 to March 15th, 2022, these pieces continue the strong compositions and driving aesthetic focus of the artist’s oeuvre, developing the threads she has woven so far while introducing a new set of idioms. Using handmade paper, printmaking and embroidery, Restemayer gives us a quiet, contemplative view of the ways humanity communicates with itself.

The works combine colored paper as a background to etchings of animals, with embroidery that stitches the work together and adds textural elements on its own.

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May 15 – July 15 2022

The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché – Christopher Rowley

Exhibition

The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché

Christopher Rowley’s fiber-based constructions have just about everything I want in an art object: palpable relationship to the body; great design; a level of craft that lets you know that the artist is smart, careful, and thoughtful; and a sense of humor and mystery. Oh yeah—and references to art and cultural history that make you feel like these objects could have been made 50 years ago or yesterday.
Rowley uses punch-needle embroidery, a medium dating back to medieval Europe (if not earlier) to make evocative forms just domestic enough that you would know how to live with them, and just art enough that no one would mistake them for pillows. He also builds embroidered, layered assemblages with Mayan-glyph-like imagery whose construction reminds me of object-maker/painters like Otis Jones and Bret Slater.
Rowley is interested in investigating systems and relationships, as well as what he terms “the absurd complexities that govern personal experiences,” summoning up Eva Hesse’s drawings of connected pipes with their quirky joints.
There’s an odd sense of humor at work in the punch-needle works in particular—a silly kind of impossible sexuality with references to seatbelts, tongues, penetration, factories, and robots. But Rowley isn’t giving us much to hang onto when titling works such as A Modest Slaughterhouse and Lackadaisical Is a Word…Isn’t It?, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret or simply experience as they wish.
The dual-venue exhibition, being held locally at Hensel’s The Windows on Cedar Project (3441 Cedar Avenue South, Minneapolis) and virtually on the Susan Hensel Gallery Artsy page, comprises 17 works. The Windows on Cedar exhibition runs through 7/15.

Some of the work of “The Regrettable Truth of the Cliché”

May 15 – July 15, 2022