Gretchen Adel

Region: Midwest

 Through an intricate process of layering and fragmentation, my work explores the interplay between creation and dissolution, where figures, landscapes, and symbols emerge and dissolve in a state of perpetual flux. Each painting becomes an environment where the tangible and intangible coalesce, reflecting complexities of memory, experience, and time.

I am drawn to the tension between what is seen and unseen and the idea that finding oneself often requires self-loss, a willingness to surrender to forces beyond our control. As I intuitively paint, rearranging figures and chromatic planes to resolve compositional challenges, unexpected visual pathways emerge, unveiling a deeper sense of wholeness and reflecting broader existential cycles of creation and destruction.

Through the female figures in my work, I see the convergence of personal history and collective memory. These figures, entwined with their surroundings, make visible the porous and ever-shifting boundaries between other and self, past and present, and life and death. Ultimately, my practice grapples with these dualities in an effort to accept and surrender to their necessary coexistence; through loss, possibility emerges.