Orli Swergold is a Brooklyn–based artist and curator whose hand-wrung paper-pulp paintings—applied to wood and metal substrates—investigate physicality by balancing the rigor of manual labor with delicate, up-close patterning. Treated as organismic entities, their wobbly or outstretched gestures reach beyond the rectangle to elicit empathy on a humanoid level. For Swergold, painting is serious play: a paradoxical collaboration with materials that blends control and unpredictability. Drawing on topography and psycho-mapping, she charts external and internal landscapes with channels, moats, rivers, and wings, while her uncanny color palette bridges the natural and artificial. By transforming pulp into layered networks of religious icons, bodily silhouettes, butterflies, letters, and fungal growth, her metamorphic works oscillate between the abject and the sublime, inviting reflection on alienation, tenderness, modern anxieties, and identity.
Swergold earned a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Brandeis University (2018) and received an M.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021), where she exhibited in three juried group shows and won the Graduate Commons Grant. Her work is in the Brandeis University Library Art Collection and she has exhibited at Asya Geisberg Gallery, 81 Leonard Gallery, and Stephen Street Gallery. She has curated exhibitions at Soloway Gallery and the Cigar Factory LIC.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.