Downtown, Los Angeles
Annabel Osberg
Unexplained Phenomenon
As IsAs Is is pleased to present Unexplained Phenomenon, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Annabel Osberg. This is Osberg's debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and her first show at As Is. The act of painting is a strange ritual passed down through the ages. Osberg employs this ritual to contort the strictures of time and three-dimensional space, evoking the surreality of modern life in the digital era. Throughout her compositions, landscapes, organic elements, and vestiges of humanity coalesce into cryptic allegories of personal anomie and human influence on nature, offering hints of danger, transcendence, and redemption. In each of Osberg’s paintings in Unexplained Phenomenon, perspective rebels against its usual rules: Some compositions have multiple horizons; others have none. Flat planes, wobbly lines, and disjunctive, brightly-hued spaces converge and disjoin, mirroring the hypnotic effect of images playing across glowing screens. Vast, barren landscapes are punctuated by passages of detail. Across a sunlit meadow in Prismatic, spiders weave silvery, barely-there webs over a giant leaf that appears to be morphing into a crystalline form whose tip, in turn, resembles a sidewalk receding into space. The tactility of painting seems more relevant than ever at a time when human touch is increasingly removed from the equation of daily experience. Osberg’s touch is delicately refined yet not overwrought, suffused with a painterly tenuousness that speaks to the difficulty of knowing and establishing truth. Her paintings remind us of just how little we know about the world around us, celebrating the potential of the unknown. Annabel Osberg is an artist and critic based in Southern California. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Pio Pico, Serious Topics, and Ladies’ Room in Los Angeles; Untitled Art Fair in Houston; the University of La Verne; and Future Fair in New York. Osberg graduated summa cum laude from California State University, San Bernardino with a BA in studio art, attended Yale, and received her MFA in painting from Boston University.