statement

I have always been fascinated by how artists throughout human history have chosen to represent our interconnection with nature through the nude and how these choices reflect their epoch.  For the primordial artist, nature was home.

When he drew images of man and beasts on cave wall with charcoal and fat, he was merely recording his daily experience in his natural environment. That his stick-figure hunters and their voluptuous mates should be as nude as the animals he observed was never in question.

Nature is no longer home to us, she is much more a tourist destination.  Certainly no representation of the nude in landscape in the 21 century can escape conveying our extreme estrangement from nature, intentional or not. There is an unavoidable strangeness or feeling of dislocation which envelopes the most sincere attempt at harmony.  How absurd man seems stripped of his possessions and identity crutches and yet it is indisputable, he gains strength, clarity and beauty when we contemplate him abstractly, as a phenomenon of nature.  My experimentation with contemporising the nude in landscape takes place within this framework of tension between these two poles of self-perception.

It is the rise of the virtual world which has permitted artists to bypass any mandate of plausibility in representational painting.  If man can now appear as an intergalactic android engaged in battle with alien species he may also go bathing in a local stream.  It is realism, if we accept that realism now includes virtual realism, that is it incorporates a high degree of improbability, a hyperbolic realism.  Man may return once again to his original landscape, his eternal home, albeit this time as a tourist, a primordial tourist.

bio

born: 1964, New York City, New York

education

New York University, Bachelor of Science

selected awards/honors

AW, Year in Review, SCOPE Art Fair, Finalist
Monmouth Museum, First Prize Jury Award, 32 nd Annual Show, 2011
SEHNAP Scholarship for Painting, New York University, 1984

selected publications

Creative Quarterly, "New Talent", Spring Edition, New York, N.Y. U.S.A. 2012
JUXTAPOZ Magazine, "Susannah Martins Primordial Tourist" , March 2013 U.S.A
ARTISTS/POETS Magazine, "Susannah Martin"  January Issue 2013  U.S.A.
INPA 2- International Painting Annual, Manifest Press, Cincinnati, U.S.A. 2012

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Galerie Kunst am Kettwiger Tor, "Susannah Martin Neue Arbeiten", Essen, Germany 2013
Galerie Stephan Stumpf, " Susannah Martin- Primordial Tourists", München, Germany 2012
Galerie Bartel Frankfurt, " Kinder und andere Menschen_ Portraits von Susannah Martin" Germany, 2009

selected group shows

ART PARIS, Saatchi Gallery, Grand Palais, Paris, France, 2011
Dacia Gallery, "Reflections" , New York, U.S.A. 2012
Manifest Gallery, "NUDE 3" , Cincinnati, U.S.A. 2011
Gallery Fishpiece, "Morgenluft und schöne Maitli" , Zürich, Switzerland, 2011