Finalist Miles Art Award 2020
TALLULAH NUNEZ
Solo Exhibition - Unearthly Blooms
February 5 to 22, 2022
Art by the Sea Gallery, Takapuna, Auckland
Unearthly Blooms
Tallulah Nunez's works construct a world of their own: they take the viewer in micro- and macrocosm, where elements of the real, the unconscious and chance collide.
Nunez's view of nature is at turns abstract, sculptural, utopian, or staged.
Nunez's enigmatic pictorial inventions are characterised by opulence and exuberant richness of detail. It is a hermetic place beyond all places that can be experienced in exterior reality.
However, this artificial nature seems beyond comparison. She derives new laws for nature, laws derived from painting.
What makes Tallulah Nunez unique in the contemporary art landscape, is the way her work reveals the artificiality of nature, nature as artefact made.
Solo Exhibition - Looking in, Looking out
July 17 to August 5 2021
Art by the Sea Gallery, Takapuna, Auckland
http://artbythesea.co.nz/Tallulahnuneznzartist.htm
Publication - Love in the time of COVID
https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/10/23/there-but-not-there-tallulah-nunez/
REPRESENTED BY
Art by the Sea Gallery, Takapuna, Auckland
Muse Art Gallery, Hawkes Bay
UPCOMING - 17th July 2021 Solo exhibition at Art by the Sea Gallery, Takapuna, Auckland
AWARDS
2022 Finalist Miles Art Award
2020 Finalist Miles Art Award
2019 Finalist Parkin Drawing Award
2019 Finalist Arts Gold Award
2019 Finalist Tasman National Art Award - Ariel
2019 Finalist Tasman National Art Award - After Paradise After Cecily
2019 Finalist Cleveland Art Award
PUBLICATIONS
ArtZone Magazine article November Issue 82
EXHIBITION
2022 Solo Exhibition - Art by the Sea Gallery, Auckland
2021 Solo Exhibition - Art by the Sea Gallery, Auckland
2020 Group show - Muse Art Gallery, Havelock North
2019 Solo exhibition - Antoinette Godkin Galley, Parnell, Auckland
2019 Solo Exhibition - Muse Art Gallery, Havelock North
2018 Solo Exhibition - Zimmerman Gallery, Palmerston North
2017 Solo Exhibition - New Plymouth
2018 Group Show - Waipu, Nelson
2018 Chambers Gallery, Christchurch
2017 Group Show - DeNovo Gallery, Dunedin
2016 Group Show - Queenstown
POSITIONS
2014 - 2020 Full-time Artist
2014 Art Gallery Assistant, Penny Haka Gallery, Rotorua
2011 - Art Curator/Manager Harrison’s Art Gallery, Tauranga
2006 - 2011 Art Teacher Harrison’s Art Gallery, Tauranga
ART COLLECTION
Tauranga City Council, Bay Park Arena
STATEMENT - On Drawing/Painting with Ink on Paper
Contemporary stories from her own experience and family lore, and snippets or news from the ups and downs of her everyday life combine with nuanced vulnerability and an expressive and experimental hand to create psychologically layered drawing/paintings about the human condition and her/our place within the madness of contemporary life. Her sensitive and questioning introspection and emotional flip flopping means nothing is too obvious or too pretty in her works.
Melancholic self portraits merge with real and imagined characters adapted to the story and how she is feeling at the time. The drawing/paintings often feel like they are questioning themselves and herself and this questioning and blurring of recollection and psyche combined with the artist's joy of exploring drawing for drawing sake make for images that have longevity and a strongly recognisable yet ever transient voice. A normally reticent and introspective character her mind nevertheless seems to be questioning the bigger harder issues and to flit excitedly between concern and celebration.
STATEMENT - on Painting with Acrylics on Canvas
Tallulah Nunez’s paintings are concerned with creating intimate imaginary and emotionally charged spaces. Her spontaneous approach to abstracts always gives way to conscious deliberation and the suggestion of order and representational possibilities. The works are full of acrylic, spray paint, ink, textiles, paper collage, dye, and crayon. This all-over in-your-face quality is intentionally intense; Nunez wants you to feel these spaces as she does, to spend time in them and understand a little about the psychic struggles that have produced them.
With their expressive strokes, vivacious colours and intimate detail, Nunez’s abstracts are reminiscent of her favourite contemporary artists - James Drinkwater, Shara Hughes and Cecily Brown, capturing aspects of their practice melded with her own mark-making to create something unique.
This intuitive approach is right at home with those of many abstract painters, such as Amy Sillman, whose description of her process is evocative of Nunez’s: ‘To find form, I have to put out images and shapes intuitively, and then literally scramble them together.’ Sillman calls this the “Uncontrollable space of Expressionism”, a space where conscious and subconscious come into and out of play, a constant back and forth.
Another tension in Nunez’s work’s is a temporal one. There is a sense of time collapsing in on itself that results from her coming at her composition unsystematically and from every angle.
Nunez is subtly upending paradigms to chart new territories. She invites us to come closer, to take time, to dwell and immerse ourselves in the work.
Tallulah Nunez has recently been a finalist in the 2020 Miles Art Award, 2019 Arts Gold Award, the Tasman National Art Award and the prestigious Parkin Drawing Prize.
LINK TO EXHIBITION
https://www.museart.nz/remnants-of-utopia
REMNANTS OF UTOPIA - October 31 to November 30
Tallulah Nunez has been buying her clothing from second-hand shops for many years and is now incorporating recycled textiles into her work as a comment on mass consumerism. Her installation piece, Remnants of Utopia, was created to begin a dialogue on the shocking situation in West Africa where tonnes of recycled clothing are washing up on beaches in Ghana.
“I’m a passionate advocate of recycling but the chronic waste of textiles in the West and the huge impact it’s having on some African countries is concerning. The clothing sourced from charity shops in the Western world are being on-sold cheaply, undermining the local textile industries and putting many people out of work. What doesn’t sell is discarded from ships off the coast, ending up on the beaches.
This year I have introduced a variety of mediums into my abstract work (ink, collage, resin sand) and because the textile issue has been prominent in my thinking it was a natural progression to introduce items of ripped clothing and textiles sourced from second-hand shops into the work.
By collaging on a variety of fabrics and then painting around and over them, they are upcycled, now a painting and once again an object of desire.”
Unearthly Blooms
Tallulah Nunez's works construct a world of their own:they take the viewer in micro- and macrocosm, where elements of the real, the unconscious and chance collide.
Nunez's view of nature is at turns abstract, sculptural, utopian, or staged.
Nunez's enigmatic pictorial inventions are characterised by opulence and exuberant richness of detail. It is a hermetic place beyond all places that can be experienced in exterior reality.
However, this artificial nature seems beyond comparison. She derives new laws for nature, laws derived from painting.
What makes Tallulah Nunez unique in the contemporary art landscape, is the way her work reveals the artificiality of nature, nature as artefact made.
