Angela China’s work can be understood as abstract depictions of co-existence. Her work exposes the beauty and the brutality embedded in the natural world through a reconciliation of seemingly oppositional forces. Thick, luscious impasto and a collision of vivid colors invoke themes of abundance and concentrated energy, the controlled chaos of verdant, flourishing landscapes — an ecology shaped by cyclical patterns of creation, destruction, and renewal.
China’s abstract canvases possess a physicality more commonly associated with sculpture than painting. Each composition’s surface reveals its previous incarnations, a generative process of both addition and subtraction. Layers upon layers of thick oil paint are applied, scraped away, reapplied, and so on, until China is satisfied with the piece’s three-dimensional presence. Her brushwork conveys a decisive, unapologetic approach to contemporary painting that results in a uniquely organic aesthetic, reminiscent of the complexity that naturally accumulates over long stretches of time and the uneven terrain of lived experience in all its permutations.
Angela China was born in Baltimore in 1985. She earned an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and also studied at the Art Students League of New York. Select solo exhibitions include: Half Gallery in New York; NADA Miami with Shrine Gallery; Mallin Gallery, New York; and Montauk Beach House. She’s also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Shrine Gallery in New York and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. The artist lives and works in New York.
Sol Kordich
In her latest body of work, Sol Kordich explores the liminal spaces that exist between dreams and waking, the veil of the subconscious. Inspired by the writings of psychoanalyst Marie von Franz, a close collaborator of Carl Jung, as well as her own notebooks and dream journals, Kordich interprets archetypal patterns through layers of expressive gestures that unfurl and dissolve across each canvas. While her earlier works invoked fleshy, embodied sensations, her recent paintings gravitate towards the atmospheric and the metaphysical.
Infused with a palpable sense of turning inward, these compositions bridge the outer world’s material density with the myths, emotions, and symbols embedded in the psyche’s vast interior landscape. Shades of deep violet, merlot, and royal blue chase each other around her painting’s surfaces, tracing an infinite loop that eventually collapses and recedes, drawing the viewer into each composition with a magnetic centrifugal force. In these constructed, astral planes, Kordich manifests states of lucid dreaming, abstracted and diffuse, intangible and yet real. By mapping these immersive, intermediate spaces where the collective unconscious resides, Kordich translates existential catharsis into a visual language that’s both deeply personal and irrefutably universal.