ARTWORK BY CHANTAL WNUK

“One day, I woke up without my health. But how much of this story should a painting hold?

I explore simultaneous feelings of weakness and strength by manipulating depictions of the body through scale shifts, compositional pressure, and a variety of contrasting oil painting techniques. The figures in my work embody fatigue, stress, gravity, power, melancholy, nausea, stability, hope, and more. This wide-ranging, shifting, and often contradictory collection of sensations acts as a channel to share my personal experience of diagnosis and treatment of metastatic breast cancer.

I aim to complicate stereotypes of the sick female body and the cancer patient through these formidable and sometimes absurd figures; crunched but pushing against their frame; both giving in to and struggling against illness.

I’m searching for the place hurting and healing touch.”

Chantal Wnuk is a painter living and working in Houston, TX. She has her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2023. She uses her work to better understand and translate the experiences of pressure, weakness, and power resulting from diagnosis and indefinite treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Through figurative distortion and varied oil painting techniques, she works to complicate stereotypes of illness and highlight the absurdities of having a body more generally.

Solo-exhibitions include Walking and Falling at the Same Time at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY; Ahead and Above Water at Stop-Gap Projects in Columbia, MO; and I Dreamt of a Perfect Ocean, I Dreamt of Stepping in a Hole at Best Practice in San Diego. Recent group-exhibitions include Between Worlds at MINT Munich, It never entered my mind at Sean Kelly in Los Angeles, Nudity is not Radical! at Kravets Wehby in New York, and Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Chantal has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Columbus Printed Arts Center, and ACRE, among others. Wnuk has received a variety of awards including the Critical Difference Grant for Research on Women at Ohio State University; an Artist Projects Grant from the City of Columbus; and an Artist with Disabilities Grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

To Tip, to Trip, to Fall, or Break

My Waves of/and Nausea

Hurting and Healing (whole and ripped open)

Losing Track of My Probable Future

Losing a Little Ground