PINK SKY, RED SEA

 

Pink Sky, Red Sea is an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Rema Ghuluom. Ghuluom is known best for her abstract paintings that investigate memory through subtle color relationships. Expressive, atmospheric and rich in texture, Ghuluom pulls from her everyday experience in her studio and its surroundings. Working intuitively, she navigates these internal and external environments; she writes, “The ways in which one sees, feels, recalls, and absorbs an experience fascinate me and I consider how this can be translated and transformed through painting.”
 

Exhibited at Hawthorn Contemporary is a series of paintings that reflect feelings of intimacy, expansiveness, love and longing. Ghuloum writes, “I try to make work that can be seen, felt, and really experienced.” Her painting practice emphasizes a process, creating living documents that inform one another. Each painting houses its own set of emotions and memories that entice the viewer with a soft, colorful glow. The atmospheric space within the paintings is achieved by a layering process. This process involves slowly building up the color field with thin stains of paint and then sanding in between to preserve the previous layers. Patterns and shapes manifest through this process, embodying a cellular memory of the previous layers, layers now partially obscured. This creates a surface that seems to breathe and remember on its own accord. The paintings begin to appear slightly sculptural, while still remaining in a state of becoming—shifting and transforming, appearing and dissolving. Diffused and ethereal qualities emerge through because of the abstraction of her work, while simultaneously representing reminiscent and lustrous moments in her day to day life.

 

Ghuluom received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018; the Esalen Pacifica Prize in 2012; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2010; and was an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2018. Ghuluom has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues like Edward Cella Art + Architecture, the Cue Foundation, UCLA's New Wight Gallery, Five Car Garage, George Lawson Gallery, UC Berkeley's Worth Ryder Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, and Arka Gallery in Vladivostok, Russia.