Christina Sucgang

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Christina Sucgang is a New York based painter who creates distinctly vibrant, large-scale paintings which explore the boundaries of abstraction. She employs a broad range of gestural mark making, lyrical line work and cartoon-like idioms to evoke rhythmic sensations. She seeks to harness the raw materiality of paint, with compositions that allude to the dynamism of sound, personal histories and emotionality. Sucgang’s work is influenced by her experience as an Asian American artist, mother and daughter. Born in the Philippines, she was raised in Southern California and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA at The School of Visual Arts in New York. At SAIC, she studied under Barbara Rossi, a member of the Chicago Imagists, a highly influential group of artists who embraced eccentric figuration, comic books and visual puns. At SVA, she studied with Mary Heilmann, whose radical exploration of geometry and gestural form arrived at new possibilities for abstract painting. These mentors left an indelible impression on her thinking and her work, resulting in a sustained interest in low-brow imagery, lyricism, human touch and light-heartedness. Yet the artist states, “play alone isn’t enough. I need more.” Often working on paintings stretched on the wall allows for the viscosity of paint to be activated. Her paintings are composed in a purely improvisational manner. The historical roadmap...

Artwork