Tallulah Nunez’s paintings are concerned with creating intimate imaginary and emotionally charged spaces. Her spontaneous approach to abstracts always gives way to conscious deliberation and the suggestion of order and representational possibilities. The works are full of acrylic, spray paint, ink, textiles, paper collage, dye, and crayon. This all-over in-your-face quality is intentionally intense; Nunez wants you to feel these spaces as she does, to spend time in them and understand a little about the psychic struggles that have produced them.
With their expressive strokes, vivacious colours and intimate detail, Nunez’s abstracts are reminiscent of her favourite contemporary artists - James Drinkwater, Shara Hughes and Cecily Brown, capturing aspects of their practice melded with her own mark-making to create something unique.
This intuitive approach is right at home with those of many abstract painters, such as Amy Sillman, whose description of her process is evocative of Nunez’s: ‘To find form, I have to put out images and shapes intuitively, and then literally scramble them together.’ Sillman calls this the “Uncontrollable space of Expressionism”, a space where conscious and subconscious come into and out of play, a constant back and forth.
Another tension in Nunez’s works is a temporal one. There is a sense of time collapsing in on itself that results from her coming at her composition unsystematically and from every angle.
Nunez is subtly upending paradigms to chart new territories. She invites us to come closer, to take time, to dwell and immerse ourselves in the work.
Tallulah Nunez has recently been a finalist in the 2020 Miles Art Award, 2019 Arts Gold Award, the Tasman National Art Award and the prestigious Parkin Drawing Prize.