MICHELE ABRAMOWITZ

Artist Statement

Around the time I was learning to drive, I found that I needed prescription glasses. Suddenly, everything was sharp—and flat!—no matter how far away it was. I realized that I had been using blurriness as a cue for distance. Now, I needed to learn new spatial heuristics: receding lines, size, relative motion, shadows, reflections, etc. As a result, I developed an interest in spatial perception and believed it is the foundation of and framework for all thought.

There are few painting movements that are truly centered around the means to depict space. The Renaissance discovered and reveled in the mathematical precision of the receding grid. Cubism revolutionized spatial perception by chopping up and arranging multiple time- and viewpoints. Other art movements have employed different kinds of space (e.g. the floating, “no space”-space of, say, Russian Constructivism, or the “endless space”-space of, say, Color Field painting), but they are most often effects of other concerns.

When I think of what kind of painter I am, I see myself as a terrible stage magician: I perform an astounding trick—the audience gasps—but I feel the most pleasure from revealing the trick’s mechanism. The marvel is not the magic but the insight into the mind’s spatial perception, shortcuts, and expectations of the physical world.

While painters always consider space, they rarely make it their subject. But space (like prepositions in language) determines the kinds of relationships places, objects, and people can have. So when I construct confounding spaces, I like to think I am inventing new prepositions, thereby offering a viewer the potential for, literally, new thoughts. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that my paintings often reference psychology, phenomenology, and sci-fi.

CV

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