Neil Fortune
Friend of the Collective
“I went to bed one night and woke up in a different country, a state of mind. It sounds propitious and crazy, rather something, one would read in a fiction manuscript. My name is Neil SUM Fortune (1980).
I was born in Georgetown, Guyana. At the age of six, in 1989, I moved with both my parents to Surinam where I spend most of my life. After graduating from the art school Nola Hatterman Academy in Paramaribo (2006), I moved to the Netherlands in 2007 to study Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Coming to the Netherlands was a leap in history for me, adding a second continent to my existence. Experiencing what Antonio Jose Guzman calls zero gravity.
In my work one can recognize three hard lines, in which my thoughts manifest. The first would be the memory of “growing up”; the second – which I think connects very well to this project ‘The State of L3” – is working with theme subjects like “routs of migration” and “identity”. The third line is developing conceptual ideas that deals with different political and social controversial issues. My work takes different forms from drawings to paintings, three dimensional objects, installation, video and photography.
I am very interested in the tactility and materiality of objects, shape, form and size etc. My paintings are a direct transfusion, for “explanations” I have no words to describe.”
