Piers Secunda explores the boundary between painting and sculpture in works that dispense with canvases and supports and address the materiality of paint. In Flag (2003), a rough-hewn, painted rectilinear form juts out from the gallery wall at a perpendicular angle, challenging the two-dimensionality of painting and altering a viewer’s experience of space. In recent years Secunda has drawn socio-political content into his forms: in 2008 he began working with crude oil, treating it as paint in works that explore humanity’s relationship to resources; for his "Taliban Relief Paintings" (2011), he travelled to Kabul, Afghanistan to cast bullet holes from scenes of suicide bombings, then incorporated these into reliefs. Describing his manipulation of paint, Secunda has said, “I cast, pour, heat, tear, smash, assemble, fuse, wrap, clamp, bolt and color it.
Piers Secunda was born in London, 1976, and lives and works in London and New York. He studied painting at Chelsea College of Art in London. Secunda has developed a studio practice using paint in a sculptural manner, rejecting the limitations imposed by the canvas. His intensive research based work, split into distinctly separate groups, explores the driving forces of both passive and aggressive human needs: examining the effects of violent geopolitics on both people and culture, by moulding bullet and bomb damage from war zones and the sites of historic conflicts, to make works. And recording energy history using crude oil as a printing medium, to examine post industrial revolution developments, both cultural and technological, which define our world today.
Secunda’s aim in life as an artist is to make records of the time in which he lives. Making a record of the violent attempts by ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) to erase our collective cultural heritage in the Middle East is a matter of real importance and urgency to him. For this reason he traveled to the front line of the war against ISIS in Iraq in 2015 to cast ISIS bullet holes.
“Occasionally a moment occurs in which it is worth taking the risk to travel to a dangerous place. This was one such moment.”
In Art Historical terms, Secunda’s work reminds of Picasso’s “Guernica” and Goya’s “Los Desastres de la Guerra” but in a Postmodern minimalist way.