TAMA TALKS with Suzanne Unrein

TAMA TALKS are brought to you by the Torrance Art Museum Advocates. This talk features work currently on view in the Main Gallery at the Torrance Art Museum in a show called Risky Business - A Painter’s Forum curated by Marie Thibeault and Max Presneill.
The focus of the show seeks to address how the concerns and expectations of AI begin to dominate the narrative in our increasingly technologically dependent society, some artists reply with the personal mark, risk taking, chance, the unknown endpoint, the illogical, the mystery…to produce a reflection of a living, very human, experience.
The exhibition is on view through May 4, 2024. The museum is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance, CA and is open Tuesday - Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free and donations are gratefully accepted.
Our guest today is artist Suzanne Unrein.
Characterized by the fervent energy of gestural mark making and wide swaths of vibrant, unnatural colors, Suzanne’s recent paintings are lyrical forms of civilized society immersed in a wilder existence. Joy, savagery and carnal sensuality that sometimes references violence, are expressed with a contemporary working of paint to create complex, emotional compositions by way of the subconscious rather than analytical mind. The background colors weave through the suggestive narrative forms, denying solidity while searching for an interconnectedness through instinctual motions. They depict a hybridized nature where animals and people are swept up in an urgent desire to exist, to flourish. The cast of characters convey shifting psychological states that speak to the ambiguities, transient responses, and faulty storylines of contemporary life.
Suzanne’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. She is a 2023 grant recipient of the FST StudioProjects Fund, New York, NY and a 2023-2024 recipient of the studio program residency at Painting Space 122, New York, NY. Unrein’s work was spotlighted in The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization (Oxford University Press) and the focus of the short film, Hands & Eyes, that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival and has had prestigious residencies and fellowships both nationally and internationally and her work is in several public collections. She is a California native and a current New Yorker by way of Florida.
You can read more about her extensive background on her website, suzanneunrein.com.