NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello opened a solo exhibition of new works by Nadia Haji Omar. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery and includes a suite of paintings on panel in the artist’s signature idiom of pattern-based abstraction. Accompanying the paintings are drawings in an intimate scale and a group of delicate formed glass sculptures inspired by the Southeast Asian Flame of the Forest tree.

For more than a decade, Haji Omar has nurtured an artistic practice that explores formal concerns of polychromy, abstraction, pattern and thematic concerns surrounding the human experience. Influenced by a wide variety of sources that include contemporary abstraction, Islamic art and patterning, various forms of architecture, textiles, maps, plants, and aquatic life, Haji Omar explores the dimensional aspect of painting through layers of textured color and marks rendered in varied densities and scales, as well as the perceptual experience of unexpected color combinations, shimmering metallics, and brilliant neon shades. Born in Australia, the artist grew up on the South Asian island of Sri Lanka, before emigrating to the United States as a young adult. Her shifting patterns of precise dots and dashes rendered over watery patches of color that appear as parcels of land, elongated petals, and linear bands speak of fluidity, mobility, and borders, seen from an aerial view as a bird flying freely overhead.

Haji Omar began the paintings on view in 2022 as a way forward from her decade-long exploration of language, letters, and script, which has appeared in the artist’s previous imagery as readable text or invented text with no specific meaning. The new works in Sunbird further the possibilities of generating visual meaning through relationships between pattern, color, and form without explicit script-like elements. This conceptual shift follows from the artist’s long study of Buddhism and meditation practice and an embrace of the freedom found in silence. It is also her response to the traumas of various current events, the difficulty of expressing feelings through words, and an attempt to process this experience spiritually.

Nadia Haji Omar's paintings and works on paper have been the subject of numerous solo and two artist exhibitions, including In Conversation: Austin Ballard + Nadia Haji Omar, Hodges Taylor, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2023, Secret Garden, Kristen Lorello, 2022, Ascension / Natural Selection, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, New Jersey, 2019, and On the Wall: Nadia Haji Omar, Providence College Galleries, Providence, Rhode Island, 2018. Collections include the RISD Museum, Providence, RI, Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO, Providence College Galleries and Collections, Providence, RI, Capital Group, Los Angeles, CA, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, and Art in Embassies, US Department of State, Permanent Collection, US Embassy, Colombo, Sri Lanka among others. Haji Omar has been reviewed in New York Magazine and Hyperallergic and included in recent publications including, the 2023 anthology of John Yau's recent criticism, Please Wait by the Coat-room: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, and the 2024 De-Canon Hybrid-Lit Anthology, A Mouth Holds Many Things. The artist has been included in group exhibitions at The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ, the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, and the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, among other venues. Haji Omar was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1985 and spent her childhood in Sri Lanka. She is of Syrian, Indian, and Sri Lankan descent and currently lives and works in Warren, Rhode Island. Haji Omar received a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 2007 and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2014.