Adriana Oliver

Faceless portraits are, essentially, an oxymoron - but not for Oliver. With elegant graphic sensibility, her blank silhouettes explore societal expectations in modern-day life. Having started out as a photographer, she transitioned to the medium of painting because she felt it offered her greater autonomy over the image and, by extension, greater capacity for storytelling. Oliver works primarily with acrylic on canvas or wood panel, and also translates her pared-back compositions into sculpture and relief. Her process is incredibly methodical, distilling each image to its fundamental elements.

The works draw inspiration from Pop Art while also riffing on art historical tropes and 1950s Hollywood romance - dousing them in an eerie sense of vintage nostalgia. Couple (2020) is a quintessential example of Oliver’s work. The purple-hued painting shows a perfectly staged living room furnished with a framed photo of a heterosexual couple on their wedding day. Though domestic, and implicitly romantic, the setting is oddly void of emotion. Thus, the work probes the ways in which marriage is co-opted by societal expectations and institutional tradition, rather than love. Imploring her viewers to consider how they see themselves, Oliver shrewdly examines individual identity through the lens of societal archetypes.