Art Fair | Art Antwerp: 3rd edition

Solo presentation Tramaine de Senna

Tramaine de Senna is contemporary artist who explores various ways of working in sculpture, painting, and drawing using materials such as ceramics, textile, paper and foam.

Her forms are analytical and emotive - an exercise in social dissection that inhabits a haunting formalism, heightened by tactility, bouts of scale, and a visceral use of texture and color.

Tramaine de Senna’s ever-evolving body of work bears witness to the artist’s intense relationship with materials, surfaces, and making, with interests in issues such as the “migration of forms,” pop and material culture, internalized violence, exuberance, and the enduring ambiguous presence - “ghosts” - of histories. De Senna's calling acts as a pendulum swinging between European theory (R. Barthes, B. Groys, J. Verwoert) and the slight, dispersive fragmentation of Americana (James Baldwin, exotica for armchair safari-ers, WWII, Brutalist and Streamline Modernism architecture, and frontier idioms). She makes a visual and conceptual link, for example, between the physical manifestation of internalized violence and the formalism of certain hybrid plastic injection molded toys, equating both to the grotesque and gothic (i.e., deformed bodies indicative of tortured souls; Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims' charred skin and radioactivity to Godzilla's flame throwing and supernatural physicality). In this sense, her forms are analytical and emotive - an exercise in social dissection that inhabits a haunting formalism, heightened by tactility, bouts of scale, and a visceral use of texture and color.