Mia Abelson

Mia Abelson is an oil painter, who originally trained in a realist style and later became a well-known painter for more progressive work than his American and European contemporaries. Hence, Abelson has increasingly used her painting as a mean of exploring by testing images. She creates images that seem to capture the "truth", in an extended view, much less objective, and secure.

The other common themes in Abelson’s work are the elements of chance and the game between realism and abstraction. Likewise, Abelson has worked alongside various movements of the late 20th century, such as American / British Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Minimalism and Conceptualism. Thus, Abelson has absorbed many of her ideas, while remaining skeptical of all these great artistic and philosophical creeds.

Mia Abelson studied at the New York University, where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts.

In the late 90s, Abelson was heavily influenced by pastoral romanticism and paint only landscapes.

On the other hand, Abelson has maintained a permanent fascination for the power of images and a long and difficult relationship between painting and photography. Hence, Abelson considers that while any medium can claim to reflect or express reality with the truth, ultimately, it suggests only a partial or incomplete vision of the subject.

Thus, Abelson borrows many of her painted images from newspapers, or even her own family albums, and mechanically begins to project this image onto canvas, a technique she used to think about how the images seem to have a life of their own. This act of visual understanding, of photographic projection, in combination with painting allows her to make a finished work of art, suggesting that all vision is a kind of conversion of the "real" into the "imaginary".

Mia Abelson often blurs her subjects and takes the opportunity of effects in her own painting process to demonstrate the inability of any artist to convey the full truth of a subject in its original condition. She uses such means to suggest that something is essentially a pattern that has been "lost in translation" often leading the viewer to pay greater attention to the pigment of oil and the dense nature of the materials, demonstrating their expressive strength and shortcomings.

In Mia Abelson’s totally abstract canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the painter's autobiography seem to be missing. Whereas, paint with many layers, movements, and scratches of color can appear as "beautiful" as something found in nature that came into existence in part.