Carolyn Oberst

Biography

Carolyn Oberst is a pioneering interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, wood relief, and mixed media. Originally from Philadelphia, Oberst lived in London and Southern Spain before permanently moving to New York City. With a background in photography and fashion, Oberst eventually trained her keen eye for composition on painting. She studied drawing at the Art Students League under Marshall Glasier. She began drawing and painting on her own, full-time during this period, beginning to exhibit her work in 1980.

Oberst has exhibited her work in solo and group shows across New York City, the United States, and, internationally, in Seoul, S. Korea. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

Artist statement

My body of work, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, has interrogated the construction of memory, nostalgia, themes of self-fashioning, and how codes of behavior are embedded in all forms of visual media. Contemporary cultural icons have been inserted or spliced into the work, exploring how the absorption of media at all ages has an indelible impact on the conception of self and others.

The strategic juxtaposition of organic and geometric forms in my compositions serves as a way of visualizing the internal impulses of the mind. The shapes represent reason and order, with some artworks featuring amorphous shards that stand in for past subjective experiences. Regarding the figures, I am playing with how profile, contour, posture, and gesture have the ability to communicate traits about anonymous subjects.

Intentionally, there are no overarching narrative structures in these works. This is a visual strategy deployed to engage the viewer in his or her interpretation of the constructed pastiche of figures, forms, and references. These motifs can be combined and re-combined by viewers to arrive at distinctly different outcomes based on an individual’s experiences and assumptions.