ILANA ZWESCHI | BEAUTY + VIOLENCE
Love + Power, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches.
Beauty + Violence is Ilana Zweschi's inaugural solo exhibition at Foster/White Gallery. Combining her passion for painting and mathematics, Zweschi's signature abstract paintings radiate color and movement.
Frames + Cages, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches.
My paintings involve math and philosophical reflection. Through hand-written algorithms, I can transform any text document into colorful oil paintings. I target destructive texts, words that are connected to harm in our current society. The raw data of the text acts as input for the algorithm, which is then run through a series of “if/then” rules I assign based on the structure and grammar of the written words to receive an output of painterly actions.
While the visual outcome of each painting is abstract, all works start with representational drawings beneath to give the algorithm something organic to react to. One small moment in the drawing can cause a ripple effect of painted marks echoing off and overlapping each other.
The show title Beauty + Violence has both visual and conceptual origins. Visually, many of the forms appear to be exploding with light and color or are walking the line between referencing a bouquet of flowers and a mushroom cloud. Conceptually, I am disarming the harm in the text by obscuring and recontextualizing it. My goal is to transform something harmful into something beautiful and point to the complicated relationship between love and power. - Ilana Zweschi
Impossibility of Death in the Mind, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 inches.
Ilana Zweschi works in Seattle, Washington. She attended Skidmore College, graduating summa cum laude in 2011 with an Art Major and a Mathematics Minor. In 2014, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the State University of New York at Albany and is currently an instructor at Cornish College of the Arts. Zweschi has exhibited expansively, recently completing a large-scale commission for the Facebook Open Arts Program. She is part of the Microsoft and SeaTac art collections and received the DASH artist grant for 2022.