Online Residency 2022
Biography
My name is Susana, I am Spanish visual artist.
I cannot remember exactly when I took a camera in my hands for the first time, but it was a long lime ago. Even though I don’t think of myself as a photographer, I am only a visual artist who uses the camera as a tool.
The camera is the tool that I need to capture the moment that catches my attention in the streets of the city that later I manipulate to create my own reality. Each shot is a sketch, a stroke or the line that will later be the final work. I understand the surface of a photograph as a canvas. Often in my work, photo and painting go together.
The topics of my work come from my daily life or from my inner world. I like to divide them in two big blocks. When I work with my inner world I like to think about the life and death, soul, destiny, time or the fleeting nature of life. My other passion is cities: history, architecture, city habits or routines, migration, etc.
Artist Statement
Susana López F. is a (Spanish) visual artist. In her work the borders between photography and painting are blurred. She uses tools from both fields with the aim to communicate what she wants, what awakens her interest, things that worry her, what she feels or what she loves.
She studied Fine Arts, specializing in Painting, at Barcelona University, from where she also holds a PhD. Soon after, Susana travelled to London, New York and Berlin to complete her studies, and her camera travelled with her to capture her movements. Step by step, she introduced this tool into her main body of work, creating a mixed media work in the middle of painting and photography.
She loves cities and is fascinated by busy people dancing in the streets. Her work is a reflection about the fugacity of life. It is a personal diary about an obsession that has followed her since she was a child. Time, that goes by so fast and that we can never make up for. She also uses cities to talk about migration. Cities are places where we are constantly adapting, where we need to find a balance between our roots and a new culture.
Susana has been participating in individual and group shows since 2000. Her work exists in gallery collections, town halls, cultural associations and in collective and solo exhibitions in Spain and abroad. She recently showed her work in SantoraSpace in Los Angeles, the Venice Biennale as part as the collateral British group, Cervantes Institute in Sofia, 1aSpace in Hong Kong, The Other Art Fair in London and Los Angeles, PointB in Brooklyn or Woman Made Gallery in Chicago.