NADA New York 2022

In “World Weariness”, Unrau turns his attention to the natural world and painstakingly renders an underwater scene of Chinook Salmon. Inspired partly by New Dutch Herring (1982), a seminal work by Dutch artist René Daniëls, Unrau uses this piece as a point of departure, and then formally, works in almost direct opposition to it. While Daniels’s painting is a loose study, with broad swaths of colour and seemingly slapdash brushstrokes that depict a school of Herrings cannibalizing each other, Unrau’s highly detailed, near photographic image of salmon becomes
a deeply considered study of light and composition.