BIOGRAPHY
Lorien Suárez-Kanerva was born in Berkeley, California of mixed heritage, Venezuelan and American. She and her younger brother had a childhood where her love of art and of nature were constants. She settled near Caracas in San Antonio de los Altos where she attended “La Escuela Comunitaria,” a private Spanish-speaking school. At the age of thirteen Lorien and her family (her father obtained a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley, her mother was a certified elementary school teacher) moved to the United States, to Oregon, in 1986. Suárez-Kanerva received her BA from UC-Berkeley focusing on Middle Eastern and Latin American histories. Her graduate degree and post-graduate work in European Constitutional Law, diplomatic relations and international business were pursued in Leuven, Belgium (Katholieke Universiteit) and in Spain (Universidad de Salamanca and ESADE in Barcelona). Since 2003, the artist has had solo exhibitions in numerous galleries and has participated in group shows at profit and nonprofit venues such as Gallery 128, Lichtundfire Gallery and Anita Shapolsky Gallery, in NYC; La Sierra University Branstater Gallery; Riverside Art Museum, San Diego Art institute, Oceanside Museum of Art, in CA; Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Art Basel Scope Miami, Curator’s Voice Art Projects, in Miami, 57th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Bembo, 2017-22. The historical influences that informed Suarez-Kanerva’s aesthetic vision include Islamic art and architecture, East Indian mandalas, the Rose windows of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, geometric and organic formalism, constructivism, and the aesthetic movements advanced by the Bauhaus, the Abstract Creation and Blue Rider groups, the Latin American Geometric Abstraction artists of the early 20th century. Artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay, August Herbin, Carlos Cruz Diez, Jesus Raphael Soto, Joseph Stella, Stanton McDonald-Wright, Archile Gorky, M.C. Escher, Johanesss Itten, Victor Vasarely, Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Charles Arnoldi, and Roland Reiss are key progenitor-figures for her. The artist draws her inspiration from a range of reading sources such as Carl Jung, Teillard de Chardin, Namgyal Rinpoche, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William Woodsworth, Lawrence Cahoone’s, “The Orders of Nature,” and Jane Bennett’s, “Thoreau’s Nature,” and Philip Ball’s, “Patterns in Nature” and “Bright Earth.”
