About

Mia Abelson, an oil painter, studied Fine Arts at the New York University. At the beginnings, her work was fundamentally figurative, influenced by Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet. To create her amazing oil paintings and pencil drawings, she uses photorealism and contemporary art techniques.

During the early 1990s, Abelson saw the possibilities offered by the use of unconventional methods to create paintings. This influence led her to create numerous photo-paintings, all of them more photographic than Rauschenberg's transpositions and much more pictorial than Andy Warhol's appropriations of media iconography.

Mia Abelson began to show an interest in subjects taken from the mass media. She created some paintings based on newspaper photographs or amateur photos, where the two realistic genres of painting and photography confront each other. Since then, she has painted many pictures in which she explores the viewer's perception of familiar objects, intercepted by the techniques of painting

Abelson’s favorite theme is sentimental in nature. In her most recent works, she represented bucolic landscapes of Central Europe, immersed in a romantic atmosphere, as seen through a lens in which different visions of the same reality converge. The result is a combination between photographic objectivity and the poetic delicacy of the painting.

In the late 1990s Abelson’s work became purely abstract. She worked on a series of monochrome paintings, called Gray Paintings, inspired by the Vietnam War. Starting in the 2000s, she concentrated on expressionist abstractions, in which she made vigorous use of color, and reserved figuration for a complementary, but separate, series of photo-paintings.

In her abstract paintings, Mia Abelson used an enormous repertoire of pictorial effects, in which she schematically condensed the history of modern painting.