Adi Oren

Artist Statement

Through my paintings, I explore what it means to be enraptured by existence, highlighting our desire to see, feel, and become. I make process-based paintings that merge figuration and abstraction through layered color, texture, and gesture. Rooted in archives, vintage photographs, and the female form in motion, I capture moments of drifting, reaching, and unfolding - metaphors for transformation and resilience. By weaving memories and intention, I create spaces where intimacy and expansiveness intertwine.

I work with acrylic and inks on canvas, integrating thick impasto, glazing, and dry-brush to create my multi-layered paintings. My work is characterized by vibrant, bold applications of color, and playful, gestural mark-making. At once fluid and structural, the physicality of paint continues to serve as a basis for my research. I drag my dry brush across the peaks and crevices of my layered paint, happily surprised by the nuances of time recorded. Like an archeologist uncovering hidden layers, I reveal the painting's history through deliberate excavation, discovering nuances that speak to the passage of time and artistic decision-making.

I harmonize colors to create the illusion of light and possibility in my work. The interplay between chance and intention, materiality and surface, forms the cornerstone of my practice. This dialogue between the analytical and emotional aspects of creation open space for surprising discoveries. Within the structure of the conscious and the unconscious, I make work that celebrates freedom and the expansion of the senses, holding the process and the journey at the epicenter of my creations.

Biography

Adi Oren (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a New York-based painter whose practice celebrates freedom and the expansion of the senses, holding the process and the journey at the epicenter of her creations. Oren received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. Oren has had solo exhibitions with ChaShaMa, New York, NY; Gallerie 271, Monterey, MA; and Hostetler Gallery, Nantucket, MA. She has participated in group exhibitions at Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Silvermine Galleries, New Canaan, CT; and FORMah Gallery (now Kaliner Gallery), New York, NY, among others. Her work has been published in Forbes, Chronogram, FAD Magazine, and Upstater. Oren looks forward to her residency with Residency Unlimited in New York, NY this spring.

Oren painted a large-scale outdoor mural in the center of Ellenville, a Hudson Valley town, during the summer of 2021, featuring diving figures that reflect themes of movement and transformation central to her work. She has been commissioned to produce numerous public works in restaurants around New York City, including a 25-foot site-specific painting for Acadia on 57th Street and 6th Avenue. Oren maintains a studio practice in New York City and Ellenville, NY, where she lives with her husband and two children.