Exhibition: 7th February to 28th March, 2014
February 6th 2014 sees the opening of the second solo exhibition of London based Venezuelan artist, Emilia Sunyer at Maddox Gallery, London.
This exhibition will allow a deeper understanding of the artist’s practice by showing early works from twenty years ago, alongside more recent and new works.
Opening the exhibition will be an installation of 5 paintings on poster from 1994. This body of work, being exhibited for the first time, is entitled ‘Skin Deep’ and depicts iconic images from an omnipresent cigarette advertising campaign from 1980s Venezuela. The source images are of perfect bodies, sunshine and fun on to which the artist leaves her mark – disrupting and obscuring the view with suggestive and organic imagery . By doing this, Sunyer is not only altering the apparent images of ‘perfection’, but she is also asking the viewer to look more closely at the marks made by the artist and their juxtaposition on this recognisable mass media.
Further series of work on show from 2003 to present day illustrate how Sunyer’s interest in the body and society’s representation of beauty and fragility has shifted into abstraction. The focus has moved from the external to the internal: the macro to the micro. Her more recent work brings together the inorganic and organic, light and dark, focus and blurring to create moving atmospheric canvases.
It is almost as if the artist has gone beyond representation into introspection and emotions. Standing in front of her works, as a viewer, you look – but you also feel. Sometimes you are left with a sense of foreboding or unease, and often they evoke a sense of tranquillity and peace. The titles of her works provide focus or subject matter: ‘Fire’, ‘Waterfall’, “Lure” or “Plunge’ yet contradicting these natural and organic representations, you have an artist technique that is very removed: there is no sense of brushstroke or artist touch. Sunyer’s technique is one of ‘application’ and ‘transferral’ of colour and form, from the palette to the canvas, in a sense the work becomes anonymous and its interpretation is given back to you, the viewer.
Emilia Sunyer studied Fine Arts at University Central in Caracas, Venezuela then History and Sociology at Goldsmiths, London. Sunyer has previously exhibited in Caracas, New York and London. Selected group shows include: the Bronx Museum in NY; Gimpel Fils Gallery in London and the National Art Gallery in Caracas with a solo show of her works being shown at Maddox Gallery London in 2011. The artist currently works and lives in London.