The Fourth Wall Gallery is pleased to present WITH THE ‘MOTHER,’ a solo exhibition of paintings by Gaby Wolodarski (b. 1981 Stockholm). It is her first solo show in Oakland in over a decade, having recently moved back to the Bay Area from Montevallo, Alabama.

WITH THE ‘MOTHER’ is borrowed from the label on the bottle of Bragg’s apple cider vinegar and refers to the living, ferment-ey gunk that floats around in there and is supposedly beneficial to one’s health. It’s a metaphor for the floaty, suspended compositions in Wolodarski’s recent paintings: fields/grounds/spaces “populated” with solitary objects/incidents, whose smallness is a way to get at the big contexts. These objects and fragments appear as/stand in for Beings, as a way to grapple with the mystery of being alive and alone in an ultimately incomprehensible depth of physical and cultural space/time. Small and isolated, together, they speak to vastness. Sometimes there apparent randomness speaks to correspondence. Sometimes their crispness and clarity speaks to the tenuousness of connection. Elsewhere their sketchiness speaks to the irrefutability of perception. The paintings leverage a range of objects/motifs, but also a range of pictorial modes: mess/clean, shallow/deep, high-tech/homespun, painterly/photogenic, crisp/blurry/pixellated, frontal/enmeshed/perspectival, saturated/greyed-out/tinted, cartoony/serious, etc., in order to access the complexities that permeate our daily visual landscape, mediated as it is by a great range of technologies, modes, and cultural baggage.

Gaby Wolodarski is a Swedish/American artist based in Alabama and California. her painting and installation work uses a mix of humor, abstraction, figuration, and trompe l’oeil to probe fictions and contingencies of the contemporary human psyche, foregrounding ways in which the visible world is subject to pressured from our language-oriented brains.

She holds a BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Cornell University. She has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally in spaces including Hatch, Rock Paper Scissors Collective, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Di Rosa Preserve, the Wiregrass Museum of Art, and the House of Humour and Satire. Recent solo exhibitions include How on Earth at the Gadsden Museum of Art in Gadsden, AL; Honey Blips at Sunday Takeout in Brooklyn, NY; What Are We Making Waking at The Range in Saguache, CO; Pigurative Faintings at the University of Montevallo, AL, and Nice’n’Dark at HPL Galleries in Hoover, AL. Her most recent two-person exhibitions, with April Bachtel and Amy Feger, in Birmingham and Montevallo respectively, address the questions of belonging, signification, correspondence, ecology, and land stewardship. She currently teaches drawing and painting at UC Davis, and has been a practicing tattooer since 2011.