Nadia Haji Omar
May 3 - June 12, 2016

The gallery is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Nadia Haji Omar.  The exhibition will be the artist's first solo exhibition at a New York gallery and will include six new 24 x 18 inch paintings.  The opening reception will coincide with the inauguration of the gallery's new location in the lobby of 195 Chrystie Street.

For the exhibition, Haji Omar has created six new paintings on canvas with layered dyes and acrylic paint.  She begins each work by staining the canvas to create saturated colorful patterns, which she then wipes away to a faded wash.  She then overlays thin washes of acrylic paint onto the surface, creating defined boundaries between planes of color, notational markings, and swathes of circular and linear patterns.

Watery blotches of color, sinuous and cellular forms, patches of a singular color rendered with wavy outlines, and tiny, open circles, repeat across the canvas.  They allude to waterways, aquatic creatures, plots of earth, and writing.  Haji Omar paints intuitively, drawing from memory her studies of Chinese landscape painting, Islamic art, as well as the languages Arabic, Sinhalese, Tamil, and French, which she studied as an adult in the United States and absorbed as a child in Sri Lanka.  The gesture of inventing a new language gives way to fluid characters passing through a portion of landscape.

Nadia Haji Omar (b. 1985, Melbourne, Australia) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is of Syrian-Indian and Sri Lankan descent.  She received an MFA from SVA in 2014 and a BA from Bard College in 2007.  Solo and two person exhibitions include "Nadia Haji Omar I Bayne Peterson," Kristen Lorello, NY, 2015, Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2015, and Achter de Boom, New York, NY, 2015.  Group exhibitions include "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," curated by Quang Bao, 68 Projects, Berlin, 2015, and "Plus One," curated by Melanie Kress, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, 2015.