Susanne Thea (DK)
Susanne Thea is a versatile artist whose forms of expression are oil and acrylic painting, installations, sculptures, video and copper etchings.
Susanne Thea is an acknowledged artist whose figurative language has attracted international attention and a great deal of interest from museums around the world. Her detailed pictures are unique for their exquisite style and sense of humor—there are new discoveries to be made every time you return to them.
“I take a very free and experimenting approach to my work, making use of more than 400-year-old graphic techniques for my copper etchings, wood engravings and monotypes. In this way I am able to create, very exactly, the image that I have in mind.”
Susanne Thea was born in 1954 and educated in Australia and Denmark. She is a visual artist, musician, composer, author and illustrator, who has received exhibition and travel grants both at home and abroad. Thea is a member of international graphic workshops and is represented in Sweden, Italy, Holland, Germany, UK, Australia, and Canada as well as at museums in Denmark, Ireland, USA and the Fiji Islands. She is a visiting lecturer at art academies, giving lectures and introductions to her inventive and witty figurative language and the etching and printing techniques she favors.
The artist goes behind the facade of the famous French Bayeux Tapestry with a detailed portrayal of the consequences of war. The frieze is 72 meters long and includes 90 color images printed as copper-plate etchings, that chronicle the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. A project that has occupied the artist for more than three years, Susanne Thea retells and modernizes the story of the Battle of Hastings, with plenty creative interpretation.
The images primarily focus on the behind the scenes story of the battle between Duke William and King Harold, but also touch on other topics including man’s search for a better life and the consequences of war. There are kings, Viking ships, mythical beasts, soldiers bearing shields and spears, castles, churches, war and peace in Susanne Thea’s pictorial frieze – but there are also passionate love scenes, overweight priests, supernatural beings, and far more women than originally portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry. “I welcome verbal and non-verbal dialogue. ’Storytelling’ is an important aspect of my art.”
