Serge Sunne, Time, Identity and Otherness

I know very little about the artist Serge Sunne. He is Russian, but I don’t think he’s gained a wide enough circulation yet to attract the kind of theorizing and speculation given to more popular artists. This, I hope in some small way to remedy.

Since discovering his works I have quickly become enamoured with their strange depictions and surreal sense of the uncanny. Sunne seems to enjoy playing with concepts of identity, otherness, and time in his works in ways that I have not seen before.

“Another Holy Mother”, the title of the above picture combines an unsettling union of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus with an entirely unworldly subject whose motherly embrace is a nightmare of its entangled, strangely disproportionate limbs. The contrast is made even more complete by the addition of the haloes around the two figures, whose pale, almost feeble light contrast so sharply with the darkness of their bodies.

Also consider the derelict ghost spaceship at the bottom of this post. Few artists I know have really focused on a little explored theme in science fiction: when the new gets old then ancient. Sunne’s “Abandoned Space Port” is another example of this lovely juxtaposition of an almost unfathomable futurity clashing with some sense of deep time.

I hope you enjoy these examples of his work, I probably be examining some of them in more detail as my studies (out side of school) continue.

For more images:

http://www.artmajeur.com/?go=artworks/display_list_artworks&login=sergesunne
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart/StudentArt/ast_id/56065