Amer Kobaslija

The George Adams Gallery is pleased to present Road Signs.

The exhibition, Kobaslija’s tenth with the gallery since his debut in 2006, focuses on the semi-rural landscape of the Florida flatlands surrounding Orlando, where he is an associate professor of painting at the University of Central Florida. He views the state (Florida) as his adopted homeland, and these paintings reflect his appreciation of its culture and people, coupled with his concerns over the impending effects of climate change and the rapidly encroaching urban sprawl on natural environments. For Kobaslija, the landscape becomes both stage and witness — a terrain where commerce, belief, desire, and spectacle coexist without hierarchy. The result is at once seductive and dissonant, humorous and unsettling, reflecting the layered contradictions embedded in our way of life.

The exhibition includes 12 paintings on aluminum panel, made between 2023 and 2026. Among the works on view are Flat Tire (2024), depicting a broken-down car under a billboard advertising Walt Disney World, Cows Grazing (2024), a view of a BP gas station that also functions as a feed lot, and another of a graffitied billboard exhorting us to Eat Mor Chikin (2023).

Amer Kobašlija was born in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1993, he fled the war in his homeland, first finding refuge in Nürnberg, Germany, and later moving to Düsseldorf to attend the Kunstakademie. In 1997, he immigrated to Florida, where he earned a BFA in painting and printmaking from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota. He went on to complete an MFA at Montclair State University in New Jersey in 2003. He is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013), Pollock-Krasner Award (2007), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2005).

Kobašlija’s paintings are included in many public and corporate collections, including the Baker Museum, Hunter Museum of American Art, de Saisset Museum, Flag Art Foundation, Greenville County Museum of Art, Middlebury College Museum, Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Staten Island Museum, Stadt Sammlung Brig, the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program, the Bosniak Institute, and the National Gallery in Sarajevo. His work has been featured and reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Art & Antiques, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, The Florida Times-Union, The San Francisco Chronicle, Kunst Bulletin, and The Japan Times.