SEELANDER, Keren

Keren is a South Australian Abstract Expressionist painter. Her works are visually powerful. Keren describes the creation of her work as a meditative process, often influenced and motivated by her feelings in relation to music, silence, poetry, colour and nature. These influences can be felt in her works as they convey emotional truth. She has been described as a tough painter because within the works scale and style of brush strokes therein, shows a vigorous energy and virtuosity. She responds to colour and texture in a sensuous manner with gestured rhythms and hints of more primal visual communication. Her images can be seen as sometimes dark but they are always luminous. Her works have been compared to Mark Rothko’s colour fields or a more feminised version of CY Twombly’s heroic style. In any case her layering of colour, use of glyphs, obsessive scribbling and geometric shapes draw the viewer into deeper levels of experience. She uses various materials, such as plaster, hand made paper, oxides and marble dust that are mixed together with paint compounds to form rich textural surfaces. Keren Seelander’s simple yet powerful works have been popular with audiences around the world. She is represented in every capitol city in Australia as well as galleries in New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and New York.