Michele Abramowitz
Michele Abramowitz (USA, b. 1984, Berkeley, California) employs traditional painting methods and invented trompe l’oeil techniques to make magnificent, often large-scale, paintings that address a new Romantic landscape created from a fusion of abstracted shapes and complicated hand-painted surfaces. Her abstracted forms evolve from repeated drawing by hand and a close read of various landscapes on a screen, using references from film and video games. She describes objects without referencing the way they actually look, using mass, depth and spatial awareness but without specific identification.
Abramowitz’s paintings surpass physical expectations through a variety of complicated surfaces and gradients, all painted in oil on canvas on top of layers of oil washes or “pours.” Each work is constructed methodically in layers in such a way as to selectively reinforce or dislocate the spatial arrangement of elements. For Abramowitz, space is akin to prepositions in language. It determines the kinds of relations that places, objects, and people can have. When she makes these new spaces within her works, her idea is to invent prepositions and offer the potential for new thoughts.
Abramowitz received her BA from Pomona College (Claremont, CA), her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), and her MFA from the Milton-Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York). Abramowitz has held solo exhibitions at TOPS Gallery (Memphis, TN), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY). Her work has been exhibited at venues including the North Loop Gallery, Williamstown, MA (2022), UBS Gallery at Bard College, Red Hook, NY (2016), Falcon’s Nest, Los Angeles, CA (2016) and Hart Street Studio, Brooklyn NY (2011). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.