Andrea Bolima (b.1991) is a visual artist, born in the Philippines and is now based in Naarm, Melbourne. Andrea Bolima’s adventures in aesthetics are fuelled by the visual qualities of experience from the actual process of painting. The artworks reveal the layering and unlayering of forms as structural elements slowly unfold and sometimes deteriorate. Bolima’s sensitivity to her surroundings can be seen from the subtle shifts in tone and delicate splashes of colour. Tonal variations demonstrate the different levels of intensity that emerge from the materiality of paint. Colours are blended and established on the canvas itself showing her mediation between careful considerations and random gestures.
Bolima’s recent work is an exploration of how a work of art emerges from the transition between stimulus and response. In particular, it examines the body’s mediation from the affective properties of paint, into the multiple dimensions of colour as a painting unfolds. “Softly coloured canvases, with their blurred ambiguous forms made through the dry brushing of thin acrylic, could from a distance be mistaken for stained colour or wet application. Using landscape or vegetative colours and no sharp edges of shape, Bolima creates a spatial tension between the flatness of the canvas and suggestions of flowers, leaves, copses or cliff-faces. She is expert at creating linear gaps between adjacent blocks of thin colour, so that the pale hues underneath form fragmented bending lines that are nuanced and suggestive”. [1]
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[1] John Hurrell: Art School Sampler. Eye Contact. 2020
Read about a studio visit with Bolima ahead of her debut solo exhibition here
RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2022 Dandelion Street, solo exhibition, Föenander Galleries
2021 The Colour Before Colour, solo exhibition, Föenander Galleries
2021 Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Award, Whakatane Arts Centre
2020 Summer Show, Föenander Galleries
2020 Semicolon, Föenander Galleries
2020 Andrea Bolima, Tyne Gordon, Rebecca Hasselman, Jhana Millers Gallery
2020 Prelude 2020, Gow Langsford Gallery