The artist hails from a family tradition of European bespoke tailoring in Germany. She attended the College for Design in Hanover, Germany and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Bremen, Germany. Dunja studied textile design and production with a focus on Fair Trade at Co-Optex International company in Chennai, India. Shen currently lives in NYC and works from her studio in Manhattan.
Dunja Messer-Jourdain is a visual artist and fashion designer. Her abstract paintings reflect her unusual relationship to visual experience. The sight of colors and tactile surfaces in different combinations and contexts are perceived by Dunja to the point of producing physical sensations, often with emotional and psychological consequences. Her works reflect these daily encounters sublimated through the prism of the artist’s playful, complex, deceptively placid and gentle personality. Dunja’s work is capable of evoking a visceral visual experience of force and motion, ebb and flow - the jet powered explosions and collisions of the artist’s intense psychological and emotional processes - while at the same time allowing for meditative focus. There can be, at times a sense of the still calm in the eye of the storm as the colors swirl around the viewers chosen focal point, transporting her audience inward.
Dunja works with acrylics, oil, glitter and beads, among other materials.
