“Suzy Spence’s Jockey in Pearls (2021) emphasizes the horse’s life, marking this bodily cavity as a privileged, perhaps even enchanted, site of vitalizing breath. Its treatment also affirms Spence’s deep and capable relation to the history of painting, from Édouard Manet’s flat mannerism to Joyce Pensato’s brazen cartoon gestures as well as the cool drips and gestalt breakdowns of Christopher Wool—all artists who insist on the work’s ontology as painting. But Spence’s horse is not alone, and herein we find a humanity not endemic to the dawn of modernist painting or the critical grit of the graffitied mark. The consonance between the nose’s hue and the canary tones of the bloused jockey alongside it, rendered in speedy, commanding up-down strokes, suggests an equivalency between “man” and “beast” that upsets the hierarchies of power and ownership governing traditional equestrian and society portraits, hunting scenes, and their attendant sports. Since 1996 Spence has plied this fertile ground of the hunt and the race, upending and redeploying its conventions in sharp-witted paintings of fox hunts, side-saddle riders, jockeys, and their veiled observers, seductive, wry, and bellicose in equal measure.”