Art Practice

German-born Suza Schiele holds a MA from Elam, School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, New Zealand, & a Diploma in Interior Architecture from the Blocherer Schule, Munich, Germany. Her art practice spans a wide range of media in participate installation, painting & sculpture.

Suza’s first public art concept, Quintinia Serrata, ‘A painting in the landscape’ was a billboard showing a blown-up micrograph of a Quintinia Serrata leaf, taken from a native tree that had developed purple spots on its leaves to protect itself from damaging sunlight. Shown at Sculpture on the Gulf 2005, on Waiheke Island in New Zealand, visitors could find shade here.

With her Happy Hat Happening, Suza positioned her audience directly in the centre of the work, by offering pink silk scarves & orange felt hats to anyone who was ‘happy’ to wear them. Thus, spectators were transformed into performers showing themselves off in the bright fluorescent colours or hidding behind them.  Her first Happing’ took place with‘TRY2’ on Sculpture on the Gulf 2007. Visitors wearing the scarves & hats while walking the sculpture trail formed ‘A living sculpture of dots & lines in the landscape.

Skysparkle, her kinetic interactive sculpture promoting peace, was installed next to a bunker from WW1 at Sculpture OnShore 2006 in Auckland. The work was recycled for the solar-powered installation Springbulbs shown at Shapeshifters 2008, at The New Dowes, Civic Gardens in Wellington & for 10 min & 40 seconds until they were removed by security guards, at the ‘Beehive’. Both works encapsulated ideas on transmission, illumination & connectedness

Suza’s idiosyncratic ‘Cosy Cosmos’ paintings & sculptures were first inspired when researching microbiological organisms. ‘The eyepiece of a microscope became the porthole of my spaceship & it seemed to me, that I was traveling through a sublime cosmos…

Her first ‘Cosy Cosmos’ solo exhibition was shown at the Mc Pherson Gallery, in Auckland in 2004, with micrographs painted on a large scale in oil on canvas, selfies as Cosy Cosmonaut & soft sculptures embellished by needlework.

Her most recent extensive solo exhibition, Welcome to Cosy Cosmos, in 2017, at Te Manawa Toi, Whangarei, New Zealand, showed ‘Micro/Macro’paintings, biomorphic soft sculptures & grotesque mixed media figurines. The exhibition included a collaborative project in which viewers were encouraged to create & display spontaneous squiggle drawings in the gallery.

Since then she has been exploring ceramics, creating Anthropomorphic Sculptures; crossovers between life forms & object forms. The first series of her new ceramic works, fusions of plants-formed vases and human feminine forms, was given the moniker “The Aunties”, due to their vaguely bossy and winsome postures. They were exhibited together with her new ceramic works at the Mangawhai  Artist Gallery during her collaborative show with Cliff McPherson, ‘Musings 2020’ in November 2020

For the Sydney Arts Festival 2023,  she has taken two of the original ceramic Aunties as models and transformed them together with Lgop partner Warwick into ginormous air-supported sculptures. Here, Aunty Uma and Aunty Marge with their looping plant-shaped arms resting on their hips, decorously wearing Jenny Kee’s iconic knitted fashion with matching summer hats, appear to have stopped for a chat on a Summers’ day stroll amongst the surprised visitors to the colorful event.