User:JSFarman/sandbox/Francesca Sundsten Rewrite (Art + Feminism)

Sundsten’s polished technique calls to mind the Old Masters, but her sensibility is distinctly surrealist. Sundsten's fine painting and mastery of realism hides nothing in haze. Her quirky, starkly confrontational imagery doesn't disturb as much as it questions. The characters hang in confused naivete, pondering, "How did I get here?"

Sundsten's paintings are the most fun in the show, and they're the best-painted.

his becomes clear enough when you look at Sundsten's excellent drawings, which, in their faint skittishness, have retained some humor, some uncertainty, the sense that once the dog with the lady's head goes skittering off the paper, she's gone forever.

KMFDM album cover:

received her MFA from Stanford University in 1990 and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987

applies traditional techniques while exploring elements of composition, palette, and minor abstractions of space and paint. Sundsten allows her process and the painting to dictate the characters in her works rather than forcing the subject to become something preconceived. The people and animals she depicts are not inspired by any specific person or creature but brought out by the course of the artistic process. As the artist states, “I'm working with ways of combining both the graphic and the atmospheric, realism and abstraction, the observed and the imagined, to form a (NOT INDEPENDENT)

She has mounted solo exhibitions with Davidson Galleries, Linda Warren Gallery, Diane Nelson Fine Art, Olga Dollar Gallery, and Parker/Zinc Gallery. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, and the University of Washington Medical Center. Critical attention to her work has been received by the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Artist of the West Coast, ZYZZYVA, Coast Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Artweek.

Francesca Sundsten was born in southern California, but moved to the Seattle area at the age of three. She has also lived for a year or morein England, Malaysia, Boston, and San Francisco. She began painting earnestly in her early 20's and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute at the age of 24.

It was the mid 1980's when 'ugly art' duelled with conceptualism. Neither discipline seemed to provide a meaningful or pertinent direction for her. After a poverty stricken three months on the European continent and visits to over a hundred museums there, she ascertained that the most engaging and necessary pursuit was to follow her love of representational painting, which was very disapproved of in her undergraduate program. Returning to San Francisco, she spent the next two years defending this very unpopular direction. A show of Odd Nerdrum's work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1985 indicated that she wasn't entirely alone, and she promptly headed to Oslo the following summer for an informal apprenticeship with him there. She was eventually awarded her diploma. Two years of graduate school at Stanford University allowed her to continue her exploration of representational painting depicting intangible and inexplicable narratives. She continues this quest living with her husband and cat back in Seattle.