16 Feb Adriana Oliver: Challenging Stereotypes One Canvas At A Time
Source Credit: Content and images from Nonsuch Foundation by Nonsuch Foundation. Read the original article - https://nonsuchfoundation.com/adriana-oliver-challenging-stereotypes-one-canvas-at-a-time/
Adriana Oliver has a keen eye for aesthetics, and an uncanny knack for helping us deconstruct our inner biases. The Barcelona based artist creates vivid and eye-catching pop art-esque compositions that provide instant aesthetic appeal. However, in stripping her subject matter back to a stylishly simple figurative form, she expertly probes her audiences preconceptions of gender roles. The result is a masterful balance of comfort and challenge—a delicate dance that enables viewers to discover more about themselves, while enjoying the experience of sharing space with Oliver’s art.
An Life As Inseparable From Art
Spanish native Adriana Oliver was born in 1990, and grew up within an encouraging family nucleus of fellow-artists. She describes artistic self-expression as having been an intrinsic part of her life from an early age, and the sense that life and art were always inextricably intertwined. Initially, Oliver’s medium of choice was photography. She enjoyed the immediacy that a camera allowed, and the freedom it facilitated to capture the world in a reflective form. She studied at IDEP, an esteemed private university in Barcelona with a curriculum centered upon image and design. As her practice progressed, Oliver began to draw upon the history of Pop Art within her photographic compositions. From here—retaining the Pop Art influence, but making it very much her own—she transitioned into painting on canvas, which remains her medium of choice today.
Oliver describes her subject matter as influenced by cinematographic pictures from the 50s and 60s, as well as research studies in multiculturalism and gender studies. Observing her pieces, there is a sense that her training as a photographer also informs the framing of her minimally and yet impactively represented characters. Each large canvas is immaculately populated by the artist’s intriguing subjects, brought to life through the decisive application of paint in delineated form, of bold and contrasting colors. Her inviting Pop Art-influenced aesthetic allows, as she describes it, the facilitation of a “neutral space”, in which viewers can contemplate their own response to the imagery before them.
Source Credit: Content and images from Nonsuch Foundation by Nonsuch Foundation. Read the original article - https://nonsuchfoundation.com/adriana-oliver-challenging-stereotypes-one-canvas-at-a-time/