NADIA HAJI OMAR
Ascension
September 15 - October 17

Kristen Lorello is thrilled to present Ascension, a solo exhibition of paintings by Nadia Haji Omar.  Five drawings from the artist’s related series, Natural Selection, will also be on view. The gallery exhibition follows the artist’s recent solo museum exhibition at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.  A full-color exhibition catalogue with an essay by Mary Birmingham, Curator at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, is available in both a digital and printed format.

Haji Omar's new paintings feature shimmering surfaces and meticulously hand-painted details.  The works combine themes of language and landscape with the formal concerns of pattern-based abstraction such as repetition and flatness.  Each individual canvas includes an overall pattern of tiny dashes capped with dots in metallic paint, overlaid against repeated bands of faded color.  A single Arabic numeral from one to seven emerges from the intricate foreground of each surface.

The concept of seven heavens in Islamic mythology provides the conceptual inspiration for Haji Omar's project.  The artist conceived the body of work as an installation within the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey's Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery, an intimate space with a hexagonal shape.  The canvases were installed within the gallery from right to left in increasing order of number and scale, so as to imply the visitor's movement through a spiritual realm.  The installation will be adapted to the space of Kristen Lorello's gallery so as to inspire a similar feeling in the viewer.

In her catalogue essay for the exhibition, Birmingham connects the meditative quality of the paintings to the natural element of water:

Haji Omar acknowledges that her work has always been deeply connected to her dreams, and having grown up on the island of Sri Lanka and currently living in coastal Rhode Island, it is not surprising that she often dreams of water. In the language of dreams, water symbolizes deep emotions, the subconscious, and spirituality—ideas that play central roles in her work...The shimmering, mutable expanse of sea mirrors the sky, with tiny points of light suggesting the glimmer of heavenly stars. Haji Omar’s use of painted metallic dots on the surfaces of the Ascension paintings helps approximate this dazzling visual effect.

Nadia Haji Omar was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1985 and lives and works in Warren, Rhode Island. Solo exhibitions include Nadia Haji Omar: Ascension and Natural Selection, curated by Mary Birmingham, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, 2019-20, On the Wall: Nadia Haji Omar, curated by Jamilee Lacy, Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI, 2018, and Nadia Haji Omar: Ellipsis, Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, 2018.  Exhibition reviews include "Nadia Haji Omar," Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine/Vulture, 2018, and John Yau, "Nadia Haji Omar's Cartographic Dreams," Hyperallergic, 2018.  Her works are included in the collections of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, the Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO, and the Capital Group, Los Angeles, CA, among others.