SUSANNE DOREMUS

Susanne Doremus is an American artist whose work centers on drawing as an expansive visual language. Known for her intricate mark making and layered compositions, Doremus creates works in which line, rhythm, and gesture form an evolving dialogue across the surface. Her drawings balance precision and improvisation, inviting viewers into a space where thought, intuition, and memory unfold through accumulations of marks that feel both analytical and quietly emotive.

Doremus approaches drawing as a site of investigation. Using graphite, colored pencil, ink, and mixed media, she builds complex structures in which repeated gestures become pathways, interruptions, and shifting systems of order. These intersecting lines generate a sense of visual movement that recalls musical notation, mapping, or atmospheric shifts. Although her compositions often emerge from formal inquiries into pattern and spatial tension, they evoke the fluidity of natural forces and the subtle traces of lived experience. This interplay between structure and openness has become central to her practice, allowing her drawings to operate as meditations on perception and the act of seeing.

Doremus earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later joined the faculty and became a respected educator and mentor to generations of artists. Her work has been exhibited widely, including presentations at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, and museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad.

Her drawings are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Illinois State Museum, the DePaul Art Museum, and numerous private collections. Doremus lives and works in Chicago.