Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 5

Aaron Collier
How He Tries

2018

About the Item

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Aaron Collier: Of Rocks and Ruins. The “Everything You Need to Know” website that intends to prepare visitors for the breezy summit and scenic overlook of Palatine Hill in Rome offers the following caution: “Without a guide or guidebook, it can be difficult to make sense of the ruins of the Palatine… you don’t want to be one of those tourists who wanders aimlessly around the hill, with no idea of what they’re looking at.” Failing to click on the host of supplied links for guide services made available to me by this website, I became “one of those tourists” in September of 2017. The difficulty of making sense of the excavations and remains drove me up that hill. The promise of innumerable fragments, pieces, and ruins (nothing fully intact or scatheless) was the reward of the climb, not the handicap. A profound inability to explain away or see through every layer was the experience and the seat that I hoped to find, one of bewilderment and mystery. This act of looking is one that prizes possibility and questions, rather than answers and identification. My professional practice as a visual artist is one that implements several modes of image making towards braving the central questions that drive my research: what am I to do with a small and incomplete knowledge of a vast, complex, and multivalent world? What of challenge or gain accompanies an incomplete knowledge of the world? How are images, which are inherently shards or snippets of information, able to picture this inability to know in full? Abstraction, marked as it is by the ability to be both suggestive and silent, proves to be a fitting vehicle for exploring the possibility of paint to simultaneously reveal and conceal. This dichotomy parallels a shifting, evolving world where what we know consistently shares an edge with what we do not. Paintings in Of Rocks and Ruins layer observed positive shapes and negative spaces from historical works such as Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Hendrick Goltzius’ Pieta to the degree that the individual and original referent becomes difficult to delineate. Piecing together a knowledge or experience of something through remaining or available fragments mimics our daily interactions with the world. Rather than suggest that these interactions foreground a certain lack or shortcoming, I wonder if incomprehensibility can ever be a source of joy? – Aaron Collier Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Assistant Professor. This is Aaron’s first solo exhibition at Octavia Art Gallery. Previous solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District of New Orleans. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at The Clemente in New York and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Additionally, his work has been featured in New American Paintings and is represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. Collier has been awarded artist residencies by the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans), ISCP (Brooklyn), and Open Ateliers Zuidoost (Amsterdam).
  • Creator:
    Aaron Collier (American)
  • Creation Year:
    2018
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 21 in (53.34 cm)Width: 16 in (40.64 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New Orleans, LA
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU11023366373

More From This Seller

View All
Maciver
By Melinda Hackett
Located in New Orleans, LA
My paintings refer to organic space and unfixed time. To call them landscapes would be misleading since they are poetic inventions of my imagination, and reference the world of natur...
Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Three Waves
By Fritz Bultman
Located in New Orleans, LA
Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...
Category

1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Intrusion of Blue
By Fritz Bultman
Located in New Orleans, LA
Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...
Category

1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Swimmer
By Fritz Bultman
Located in New Orleans, LA
Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...
Category

1940s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Swimmer
Price Upon Request
Seaworm
By Fritz Bultman
Located in New Orleans, LA
Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...
Category

1970s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Seaworm
Price Upon Request
Haven series 357, 360, 361
By Jerry Cabrera
Located in New Orleans, LA
3 parts: 9 x 48 inches each $2,200 each Jerry Cabrera’s Light Painting series captures the preciousness and sacredness of light through his glowing and vibrant rectangular canvasses...
Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

You May Also Like

Kyle Andrew Szpyrka - Unity 3-4, Painting 2021
By Kyle Andrew Szpyrka
Located in Greenwich, CT
Another area of focus while exploring the number 3 has been the three centers within the body for creation; the mind, the heart, and the groin/sexual center. From the power center o...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gold Leaf

Original-The Rosarian-British School-Awarded Artist-Expression-Abstract-Roses UK
Located in London, GB
This painting is one of the Rosarian-La Vie en Rose : Summer Bloom Series where she takes on the challenge of white and roses; in Shizico's opinion, colour of white and roses are the...
Category

2010s Abstract Impressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gesso, Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

Original-Dahlias in Dusk-British Awarded Artist-Exhibition Collection-gold leaf
Located in London, GB
With strokes of Gold, Oil, Gesso and Acrylic, Shizico orchestrates a visual symphony of abstract expression in this on-going series [Landscape Memories]; it's a part of her [Sunlit S...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gold Leaf

Original-LargeCanvas-Summer Bloom-Tree-UK Awarded Artist-Exhibition Collection
Located in London, GB
Summer Bloom series began in 2022, which Shizico Yi celebrates the season by painting en plein air in her garden and locations. 2024, she embarks on a fresh chapter with her new cott...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gesso, Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

Original Diptych-La Vie en Rose-British School-British Award Artist-Summer Bloom
Located in London, GB
In 2024, Shizico embarks on a fresh chapter with her new rose garden, which will take years to fully flourish. The first ten newly planted roses in her new Memorial Garden project inspired this series of rose paintings. (Also inspired by another new series she is working on called Breakfast with...
Category

2010s Abstract Impressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gesso, Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

Original Set of 2-The Rosarian-British School-Awarded Artist-Expression-Abstract
Located in London, GB
These two paintings are the Rosarian-La Vie en Rose : Summer Bloom Series where she takes on the challenge of white and roses; in Shizico's opinion, colour of white and roses are the...
Category

2010s Abstract Expressionist Abstract Paintings

Materials

Gesso, Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

Recently Viewed

View All