Mixed media and paint

Contemporary abstract painting by local Houston artist Terry Suprean. Currently featured in the show "5 Artists 5 Rooms" at Reeves Art + Design in Houston, TX.

Suprean’s sublime and otherworldly paintings are best approached as a genre of diaphanous landscape painting approximating the apocalyptic glow visible only at the world’s end—reimagining the tradition of landscape painting for the Anthropocene. His process results in the type of beauty that seduces the eye as it provokes a nonspecific anxiety, like watching a sunset that is extra colorful because the atmosphere is choked with industrial gases, or surf that is frothier due to toxic run off. Painted flat and grown like sedimentary landscapes, Suprean’s paintings start by the manufacturing of his own paints (using non-traditional binders and pigments—often mineral based and sourced from the earth), the experimental quality of these artist manufactured paints catalyze physically demanding painting systems which mirror geological forces and trace the movement of Suprean’s body on the paintings surface. Attempting to deconstruct the patriarchal, heteronormative depictions of landscape imagery particular to western art history, Suprean’s processes embrace chance, evolution, and bionomic consciousness—introducing his own queer perspective on reimaging the landscape as an inclusive space for cultivating healing and glimpsing the sublime through collective mourning for what we have already lost and will lose to climate change. The question of how to make a new kind of landscape painting is central to his work, as well as the hope that in reimagining the landscape we may also reimagine the social space it dictates.

Terry Suprean is an artist, curator, and educator living and working in Houston, TX. Starting with the making of paints out of traditional and non-traditional pigments & binders his painting practice uses process-based systems to ask novel questions about the painted surface, and how that surface can become a space of organic potentiality reimagining what landscape painting means in the Anthropocene. Suprean’s curatorial efforts include the founding of the collective arts space Civic TV, for which he has served as the visual arts curator between the years 2014 and 2020 when the project ended. Suprean has been involved in numerous solo, two-person, and group exhibitions, and has been covered widely in Texas-based art publications.

H 30 in x W 24 in x D 1.75 in