A Digital Pastoral
Michele Abramowitz

GALLERY II

Michele Abramowitz, *In Mjölnir’s Wake* (detail), 2021, Oil and black gesso on polyester canvas, 60 x 50 inches.

April 23 - May 22, 2022

Opening reception: Saturday, April 23 from 6-8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce A Digital Pastoral, an exhibition of recent paintings by 2021-22 A.I.R. Fellow Michele Abramowitz. This is Abramowitz’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Positioned within the art historical tradition of pastoral landscape painting, A Digital Pastoral reimagines this genre from the perspective of a far-future, fully-digital painter. Standing in for the works of this anonymous artist-to-come, Abramowitz’s abstract paintings picture an idyllic and nostalgic early-digital age. And yet, like the ominous presence of smokestacks or trains in post-WWI agrarian landscapes, this painter of the future cannot help but depict in their works omens of a looming destruction. From their vantage, that lost age (ours) still intersected with the physical world, but was bleeding more and more into the sensorially-depleted digital characteristic of the era to come.

Abramowitz’s paintings in the exhibition evoke both physical space and computer space: they look as if a sentient Mac screensaver read China Mieville and listened to Radiohead. The textured weave of the canvas transitions into smooth, black gesso shapes through the appearance of cast shadows, created by embedded black dust from sanding. Her painted CGI-like gradients abut glossy, reflective surfaces. She floats waxy, opaque paint over diffuse washes of color. Her shapes themselves are clean and defined, but just beyond recognition, like a visual tip-of-the-tongue or a future still coming into form.

Brooklyn-based painter Michele Abramowitz (b. 1984, CA) works in oil on polyester canvas. She uses gessoed and un-gessoed surfaces to explore the material and spatial effects of paint in abstract compositions. Her paintings often reference themes of the future-as-history, psychology, and confrontation. She graduated from the Milton-Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard (MFA, Painting, 2017), Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, Painting, 2010), and Pomona College (BA, Neuroscience, 2006).

View the Press Release here.

View Michele Abramowitz’s page here.

Public Program:

‘One’-Page Sci-Fi Book Club

Saturday, May 21 from 3-5 PM ET

Zoom

For more information, click here.

To register, click here.