Room: West Dining Room
Una Ursprung’s landscapes are earthy and subtle with vibrant and playful gestures of colour. Her work features a combination of oil painted serene and calm natural imagery with contrasting and sometimes chaotic, abstract shapes rendered in spray paint directly over the top. The interplay between these two approaches to mark-making gives her work an ethereal feeling of separation: the canvas is both a portal to another world and a plane on which the abstract gestures are captured. It is as if the window through which we gaze upon these scenes of nature has been vandalised, and we are viewing outwards from within. Perhaps trapped.
On her work for the Four Acres site, the artist states:
“My paintings are not only intended to point out the conflict between humans and the natural environment, but to point out one of the essential elements of Unilever’s commitments for the future: to create a natural, harmonious and sustainable world.”
Oil and acrylic spray on canvas, unique
2021
Una Ursprung
Artist info
Una Ursprung was born in Taiwan and now lives and works in Alsace, France. Her work features a combination of oil painted serene and calm natural imagery with contrasting and sometimes chaotic abstract shapes rendered in spray paint directly over the top.
Her landscapes are earthy and subtle, and the gestures on top playfully vibrant. The interaction created is one of disquiet, as if the idyllic environment harbours something else. We are not viewing a utopian landscape but one that is perhaps more real and more honest.
Humanity’s position as the blight upon the environment is especially noticeable in 2021 – the year of pandemics, flash floods, and wildfires. In creating these timeless yet immediately relevant works Una is forcing the viewer to look beyond the beauty we see around us, and to question what effect we are having upon it.