Jack Shainman Gallery will present 'Night House', a new exhibition of paintings by Becky Suss, at its 513 West 20th Street location in New York from September 10 through October 31, 2026. An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, September 10, from 6 to 8 p.m. The gallery says the show continues Suss’ long-running exploration of interiority, domesticity and memory, while shifting her focus to the darkness and quietude of night.
According to the gallery’s release, 'Night House' uses imagined spaces and intimate vignettes to examine the emotional and psychological resonance of interior space. Suss’ paintings, it says, draw on the specificity of remembered detail, treating night as a time not only for reflection but also for heightened perception and self-knowledge. The exhibition marks a departure in tone for the artist, whose work has often been defined by brighter, saturated color.
Suss has built her practice around domestic interiors and the objects that inhabit them, ranging from her grandparents’ home to rooms drawn from works of fiction. The gallery notes that her paintings frequently focus on spaces traditionally occupied by women, positioning the home as a site where emotional lives form, memory is cultivated and values are transmitted across generations. Her scenes are typically unpeopled, but they are crowded with books, ceramics, paintings, statues and other details that imply human presence.
The works in 'Night House' are described as a study in blacks, greys and deep blues, modulated by delicate light. The exhibition begins with 'Night Garden', which shows a home’s exterior lit by moonlight, and moves into compositions that invite viewers to look inward and beyond the surface of the rooms depicted. Patterned wallpaper, shelves of books and trinkets, and softened forms contribute to an atmosphere of stillness and absence. The gallery also points to Suss’ recurring formal distortions, including flattened architecture, exaggerated proportions and warped perspective, as devices that blur fact and fiction in remembered images.
Windows recur throughout the exhibition, bringing in views of a landscape that shifts between flowering and frozen, blossoming and bare. In the gallery’s account, those outdoor elements echo the patterned interiors, tying cultivated domestic space to the living world beyond. The objects within the paintings similarly point to histories of cultural value and preservation, while the works’ imagined or even impossible constructions reflect the tension between longing for absent figures and the necessity of solitude.
Suss was born in Philadelphia in 1980 and lives and works there. Jack Shainman Gallery notes that she received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, a BA from Williams College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Her solo exhibition 'The Dutch House' debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art Chattanooga in 2024 and later traveled to The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, and Cheekwood Estate and Gardens in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2025. Her work has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
