Portraits rooted in personal experience
This week we welcome Giustina Surbone, a painter, curator and video, performance and culinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her paintings are an exploration of unfamiliar beauty within the construct of portraiture and narrative. The works epitomize certain aspects of humanity: ageism, body image and sexual identity, often with a nod toward art’s historical symbolism. Surbone designs her paintings to deliver a direct impact by virtue of size, style and the expressive force of her subjects. “My subjects confront themselves and their audience in terms of their inner emotional being to communicate truth and the poignant and transitory nature of life and beauty,” she wrote in a statement for an exhibition earlier this year.
Venues where Surbone has exhibited in both solo and group shows include McCaig-Welles Gallery, Exit Art, Tribes Gallery, Tabla Rasa Gallery, Gallery Korea, Flux Factory, Sideshow Gallery, Lascono Gallery, El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109, Art House Gallery, Pen and Brush Gallery and PS122 Gallery. Her work has been published and reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Hyperallergic and Time Out New York, and is in the Kentler International Drawing Space collection as well as private collections
In addition to her practice as a painter, Surbone created and produced the Hungry Grlz Project, an ongoing series of works using the table as a focal point for absurd dining experiments and decadent artistic presentations, including painting, performance, installation, video and photographic works. In 2012, she was commissioned by the Flux Factory to create a public performance work titled “A Bacchanalian Banquet” for the Banquet of America Experiment, which was influenced by ancient Saturnalia and Filippo Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook.” Her most recent project, entitled “RAGE,” is based on a global feminist ideology that was initially inspired by the 2017 Women’s March in Washington and the #MeToo movement.
In Surbone’s words: “In my painting, I explore unfamiliar forms of beauty within the construct of portraiture and narrative. My work examines how instinctive responses to external stimuli shape our decisions, appearance and the ways in which we navigate the world. I construct images that deliver direct impact through scale, stylistic tensions and the expressive intensity of my subjects. My subjects confront themselves and their audience through their inner emotional being, communicating truth and the poignant, transitory nature of life.
“My works engage with the complex aspects of the human experience and are studies in ageism, sexual identity and fetishization, body politics, beauty standards, food porn and addiction, and gender-‑based discrimination and violence. My paintings function as idiosyncratic figurative portraits and narratives formed by my personal experience, as well as by art history, cinema, current events and the ongoing struggles embedded in contemporary existence.
“When painting, I rarely work from direct observation. I am instead drawn to the transformation that occurs when a photographic image is recontextualized and becomes a painting. While most of my source material originates from my own photographs, I also incorporate personal archives, found imagery from the internet, print media, film stills and discarded images.
“My broader practice includes ongoing multidisciplinary series. Most notably, the Hungry Grlz Project (2011-present) explores our complex relationship to food through both private and public dining experiments. In these works, the table becomes a central stage for observed interactions in decadent, performative presentations, where guests are invited to engage with both the food and one another without prescribed boundaries. These installations and performance pieces have informed and inspired paintings, videos, photographs and sound works.
“My more recent project, RAGE (2019-present) is a series of large-scale multimedia works rooted in global feminist ideology. Initially inspired by the 2016 Women’s March in Washington and the #MeToo movement, the project continues to evolve in response to the worldwide persistent and ongoing assaults on women and women’s rights.
“I maintain a daily studio practice rooted in patience and consistency. I work slowly, which allows space for experimentation, problem solving and the organic evolutions of ideas. Across media, my work resists idealization, instead embracing the difficult, contradictory and often unglamorous truths of contemporary life.”
Very powerful and complex work. Such a layering of personal and historical references.