Human Spirit
Christina Sucgang
13 March — 3 May, 2025
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is delighted to present Human Spirit, a solo exhibition by Christina Sucgang in Mumbai. Born in the Philippines, Christina Sucgang was raised in Southern California and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA at The School of Visual Arts in New York. At SAIC, she studied under Barbara Rossi, a member of the Chicago Imagists, a highly influential group of artists who embraced eccentric figuration, comic books and visual puns. At SVA, Sucgang studied with Mary Heilmann, whose radical exploration of geometry and gestural form arrived at new possibilities for abstract painting. These mentors left an indelible impression on her thinking and her work, resulting in a sustained interest in low-brow imagery, lyricism, human touch and light-heartedness.
Human Spirit introduces the artist’s new abstract paintings featuring silhouettes of the body, partial allusions to the landscape, references to the play and pleasure of children’s drawings and examinations of art history, all of which have been subtly painted as if placed on the surface by accident or incident. For this show, the artist exhibits three separate, but related, bodies of work. The first body of work, exemplified by works like Garden of Eden (2024) explore the use of precise edges between forms, lines and gestures; here her compositions are highly composed and veer directly into elegance. Other paintings like Gut Reaction (2024) and Daisy (2024) rely heavily on outlining the edges of large forms, often with bright reds; these lines interact with skeins, drips and rough passages of paint in an effort to alternate between high levels of control and more lively mark-making. Panorama (2024) and Human Touch (2024) belong to a third body of work using roughshod, drybrush, and overtly physical applications of paint to activate surface tension, explore the possibilities of elliptical movement, and lean further into the energetic and expressive dimension of oil paint. All three bodies of work acknowledge that painting can be both expressive and referential, and that paintings are not pictures of a material reality, but are a material reality.
Jason Stopa, 2025