Giustina Surbone

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, video, performance, photography and culinary practice. 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 work engages 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...

Artwork