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Q&A Caroline Absher
Your work balances the abstract and the figurative. What does this balance mean to you?
I’m drawn to images that remind you of something but don’t fully resolve. The paintings often appear completely abstract at first. But then, with the figures, once you see them, they become quite present. I love that in‑between moment when a painting shifts right before your eyes. The figures are elusive, but once you notice them, they never disappear and the painting turn from abstract to figuration. They even change with the light through the day.
Maybe these marks or gestures, remind you of something, but what it is stays just out of reach. I’m trying to capture the feeling of seeing a cloud and seeing a fleeting image. I love the idea that we can pick up on things that nobody else can. This form of perception is almost like have a language that’s mine and mine only, but everyone has one.
How does the subconscious influence your work?
In the past year and a half, I started really studying Carl Jung and his work in the analysis of the subconscious mind and how it affects our everyday life. I think that it's important to notice these ephemeral moments, things that pop up for us and to really sit with it for a moment and think about what it's bringing up. I think that the symbols and archetypes of everyday life, they're not only learned from throughout our lives, but they're also embedded into our genetic memory.
When these symbols come up, it's very important to sit with it for a second, to question why you notice that in that moment. It’s a hidden language; we're constantly in communication with our surroundings and what's in our vision. I think that's incredible.
Your brushwork sometimes resembles calligraphy. What draws you to those marks?
The calligraphic quality comes from the speed and energy of my process. The paintings take a long time, but the gestures themselves are fast and intuitive, and that immediacy gives them a kind of velocity. Everyone has a different way of writing in cursive, right? And so, we have this almost fingerprint of handwriting, it can deeply personal – like getting a tattoo of your dad's handwriting.
When I started making these marks, they looked like a word, but they aren’t. Like with the figurations, that in‑between quality really drew me in. They suggest a language, a hidden form of communication.
V1 Gallery is pleased to present
Lost Language
A solo exhibition by Caroline Absher
May 1 – June 6, 2026
Opening reception: May 1, 16.00 – 21.00
Have you ever smiled to yourself at a message hidden in plain sight? A bird's imprint left in the snow, gone before you could be sure you saw it. A cloud formation that held, for one suspended moment, the shape of something familiar. These moments arrive uninvited, visible only to us. Are they real? Do we perceive them, or do we will them into meaning? Where does the realm of the explainable end?
In this exhibition, Caroline Absher explores the symbols that surface around us daily, and the ways in which we attempt to decipher them.
Understanding human consciousness remains one of humanity's oldest and most elusive pursuits. For Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a symbol is not merely a sign, it is a living image pointing towards something not yet fully known, a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. These flashes suggest that the boundary delineating inner and outer worlds is far more porous than we allow ourselves to believe, that the psyche is in constant, unspoken dialogue with the real to make sense of our experiences.
Absher is fascinated by the power of pattern recognition, by the way the mind constructs our reality from fragment and feeling, and by the challenge of rendering the intangible into the physical, three-dimensional canvas. Her practice draws from a constellation of sources: a lifelong love of science fiction, formative experiences of deep meditation, braided together with a restless desire to push both technique and material further.
Absher’s vivid paintings alter the atmosphere around them. The strokes of her brush pulse like streams of charged particles, fields of cosmic radiation waiting to be released. Beneath the apparent chaos, hidden figures emerge: ghosts, angels, messengers. Divine emissaries crossing past, present, and future, held simultaneously within a single surface. Each surface conceals its own archaeology: infinite layers of oil paint, multiple versions buried and reworked. A metaphor for time, for memory, for the self in perpetual revision.
At a moment when we have largely outsourced our thinking to screens and devices, when the body has been withdrawn from the act of knowing, Absher calls us back to following our own intuition rather than seeking a fixed reading. Just as the symbols we perceive are never entirely fixed, her works resist final interpretation. Hovering fluidly at the threshold of abstraction and figuration, no two viewers will encounter the same meaning. Somewhere between spiritual psychosis and lucid enchantment.
Lost Language is Caroline Absher's first solo exhibition with V1 Gallery.
Caroline Absher (b. 1994, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Absher's recent solo and group exhibitions include "The Silver Cord" at The Journal Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2025); “Persona” at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, New York (2025); “Lighting (Striking) Blue” at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden (2024); “City Life” at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (2024); “Blue Dream” at Shrine in Los Angeles, California (2024); “Back to Oz” at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, New York (2023); Tennis Elbow 107 at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2022), “Women of Now” at Green Family Art Foundation, Texas (2021), The Armory Show (2022,2023,2024) Independent New York (2024), among others. Absher has participated in artist residencies such as The Macedonia Institute, New York, further expanding her artistic practice. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art.
Text by Louise Cattarinussi
