Nadia Haji Omar

About

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.

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 childlike gesture of inventing a new language gives way to fluid characters passing through a portion of landscape.