Collection 2026

      Soft

SUNARI SOORIAARATCHI is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice exists primarily in the realm of expressive gestural painting. Sunari’s works respond to her experience and employ the language of colour and form to give expression to this experience. Love, loss, hope and confusion among other emotions and experiences are all expressed on the canvas. 

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The paintings are built with intuitive and felt responses to colour, texture and gesture of the body in physical relation to the canvas. Emotionally charged abstract works result. These are reflections of emotions, experiences in the artist's life and at times memories from a dream state or recognition of thoughts and feelings brought forth by experiences in nature or in daily life.

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Sunari is interested in ideas of what is and isn't considered beautiful as well as in conveying feelings through colour and marks alone on the canvas. She wants the audience to feel what she feels when she makes the works. She is also interested in the unseen energies that guide every decision, be it on the canvas or in life, and in the unfolding of life.

 

Her work is also influenced by architecture, particularly ancient classical ruins and notions of beauty as seen today in what remains of them. Perhaps in these physical ruins Sunari sees  metaphors for the dreaming, despair and hope of life.