Nina Surel was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lives and works in Miami since 2001. She studied at the Architecture & Urban Planning University of Buenos Aires and The Art Institute of El Teatro Colón, also in B.A, Argentina. Her work has been exhibited widely in institutions, galleries and art fairs both in the United States and South America, including the Naples Museum of Art, The Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, as well as Art Fairs in Buenos Aires, Chicago, New York, Miami, and London. She has been reviewed in national and international publications, and is an Artist-in-Residence at Art Center South Florida.
Artist Statement: Over the last decade, I developed a series of mixed media portrait-landscapes. I face this process and live it to the fullest, becoming the object and the subject of my transformation – one material among the materials -, reciting the roles of many characters within a single narrative and continuously changing appearance.
My identity, also assumes others, corresponding not simply to phases of my existence but to authentic alternatives, overlapping and spirally intertwined one with the other:
The woman-character, then, that emerges from my paintings deeply tied to the idea of femininity, closely connected to the physical, tactile, sensual factor, is also always built through the second degree reference to imaginary models “overturned” and “acted upon” through the artistic procedure. The characters embedded in these scenarios always precisely indicate an identity that lies half way between fiction and my flesh and blood, between mythology and autobiographical reality.
I employ a wide range of media, such as photographs, lace, buttons, porcelain, jewelry and resin on wood.
The use of resin freezes all the elements and the relations, pouring over figures, landscapes and objects like a film that in so doing separates this world, this narrative universe obtained through fragments of past epochs and styles, from pieces and shards and residues of real artistic forms and lives – from our world.
This crystallization means to me building a space that is almost completely separate from the one belonging to daily existence. Bringing forth, digging out, extracting the figures and the tales outside the flow and the reality of time.