Susana Amundarain

SUSANA AMUNDARAIN

Biography

Susana Amundaraín is a Venezuelan-born American artist. She has exhibited internationally in numerous solo shows and group exhibitions. Her visual language has consistently developed in a non-figurative direction and her work overlaps different disciplines, from painting and drawings on paper to scenic design and writing in the form of lyrics and librettos. She has received grants from the Heinz Endowment for a collaborative production in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as individual grants from The Elizabeth Foundation in New York and CONAC Visual Arts in Venezuela. She was recently awarded an artist residency at Yaddo, New York, which she completed during the summer of 2012.

Ms. Amundaraín holds a Master of Fine Arts degree, with emphasis in painting and performance art from the University of Denver in Colorado. She has also been a Visiting Scholar in Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, in NYU, NYC.

She is a faculty member of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and the resident scenic designer for TanzTheater André Koslowski. Amundaraín’s work is represented in museums in South America and the USA, as well as in many private and corporate collections, such as PepsiCO, Polar Foundation, ALCOA, and Minitab. Susana currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

About her work…

Painting is the medium I consider my foundation, but also my solitary work, the one I can go in to understand my own perceptions a little more, a little better. In here I always hope to allow a subtle luminosity come through numerous thin layers of paint. I don’t follow trends, but I feel at home with abstract thinking and abstract images. Some of the works on paper show different approaches, closer to the intimacy and spontaneity of drawing; this becomes a place for me to play and enjoy metaphors, usually connected to texts or music. When I work as a scenic designer, the process is completely collaborative, outward, working closely with a director or choreographer, with a group. As a librettist, I am aware that this also involves collaboration, although the gestating time is very internal, while the story is created through its characters and situations.

Mostly, the main character of my visual artwork is that luminosity I have mentioned, in the same way that the subtle light of our consciousness emerges through the many layers of our physical existence, but being the center of who we are.