Michele Abramowitz

These Intermediate Reals, Michele Abramowitz’s solo exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery is composed of 4 sublime, large-scale oil on canvas paintings that address speculative fictions through intricate technical combinations of surfaces and gradients.

These Intermediate Reals is named for the space between materiality and immateriality. Abramowitz writes, “a painting is a material thing but an image is an immaterial thing. It exists only in one’s mind. Without the mechanisms of sight and a mind to interpret their signals, an ‘image’ is just light scattering off of physical pigments, binder and surface. Thus, all paintings are intermediately real things. (Incidentally, this might be said of people too.)”

Abramowitz works digitally at first, composing her abstract forms on a computer. Drawing on her screen allows her to translate physical space into the digital. She then converts these ideas by hand into her paintings. She uses an almost scientific approach towards her application of paint, carefully treating the surface of her canvas with tinted gessoes and a series of oil pours, before she begins her painstaking, freehand recreation of her digitally abstracted forms. The result is an exhibition of paintings that evoke the unknowable, producing a new romantic landscape.

Michele Abramowitz (USA, b. 1984, Berkeley, California) 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 A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2021) and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2022). 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.