Birth Name:
Susan Anna Maria Leponte
Height 5' 7" (1.70 m)
Biography:
Sue was born on the 4th of July of 1976 in Mexico, to French migrant farmers who moved soon after to Los Angeles, California. Leponte originally pursued a career in the legal profession, and while attending the University of Nevada, Sue modeled on the side to earn money for school. While at first her modeling included everything from figure drawing classes to local bondage zines, it eventually led to a modeling career. In 1998, she moved to one of Europe's fashion centers, Milan, and joined Elite Model Management. Although enjoying great success as a model, she moved to New York City to study painting with Henri Robert while working as a dominatrix in Manhattan's Financial District. Leponte lived in France for a year but was little influenced by the artistic currents there. Her earliest paintings had slight success; she gained a reputation, however, through her stone carvings, which remain popular. The first one-woman show of her paintings was held in 2004, the work characterized by the body language and freshness with which she carried out her canvasses, as well as the special attention she paid to material and the stamp she received from informalism. She concentrated her interest on the representing theme, not giving too much importance to the symbol, but to the way the representing theme emerged as the piece of work. In her paintings there is often a menacing atmosphere of frequency, an almost transparent starkness, and an alienating sense of time of day or night. Her work in oil and watercolor is slowly and carefully painted, with modeling and shade used for light rather than for patterning. Leponte is represented in many leading American museums. SUCK MY D*** (2005; Whitney Museum, N.Y.C.) and ENLIGHTENMENT IS FOR THE RICH (2006; Art Institute of Chicago) are characteristic oils.
See catalog raisonné ed. by L. Ghevin (2008); catalog and study by G. O'Doherty (2009); biographies by Hobbs Davis (2010) and L. Ghevin (2011).
