Nina Surel is a multidisciplinary artist whose work best described as an on-going exploration of the deepest recesses of our collective unconscious from a feminist standpoint. Using her body as a symbolic place and a privileged subject of her research, she leads us into dark labyrinths populated by our own fears and prejudices. Addressing core issues associated with childhood, femininity, history and social stereotypes, Surel’s body of work stands as a witty, looming yet convincing portrayal of modern woman.
Nina Surel
Artists
In her paintings mixed media were pushed to their limits to configure a strategy oriented to blur the lines between reality and fiction, through the stratification of techniques – photography, painting, digital intervention, assemblage – and objects: porcelain, buttons, dresses, jewellry. The accumulation confers on these artworks a peculiar and steep trait of decadence and obsession; the artist becomes the object and the subject of this transformation, playing the roles of the different characters within the narrative and constantly changing her features. The overload lets the works protrude always, with bravery and audacity, their identity pointing towards the kingdom of kitsch, gaining the creation of perturbing worlds that challenge the viewer: duplication, reproduction, mirroring are the main functions of this process. The resin freezes all the elements and relationships, draining figures, landscapes and objects like a wrapping: the artificial balance of the levels crystallised in time and space.
Before 2001, in her native country, Argentina, Nina Surel studied both Costume and Set Design at The Art Institute of the Teatro Colón and Fashion and Textile Design at the Architecture & Urban Planning College of the University of Buenos Aires. After 2001, having moved to the United States, she poured elements from that academic background into the production of paintings, installations, assemblages, photos and videos. The result is an ever widening array of techniques that allows her to unravel archetypes, prejudices and repressed aspirations through enthralling aesthetic illusions. The baroque and surreal findings of Surel’s exceedingly personal quest for a non - patriarchal version of the eternal feminine have been exhibited widely in instituti ons and galleries across the United States, Europe and South America, including the Naples and Boca Ratón Museum of Art (Florida), The Chiesa di San Matteo, Luca, Italy, the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, California), and The Museum of Contempor ary Art and Miami International Airport in Florida.