THE LIVING ROOM
With her debut solo exhibition Squeezing the Ocean, Ada Roth ponders the ethereal tension between mystery and revelation. Her visceral, dreamlike compositions blend abstraction, surrealism, and spiritual introspection to convey sensations of suspension and mystery. As she describes; “the feeling of floating on the surface of a vast body of water, with sunlight on your face, knowing there’s a dark depth below ready to swallow you up. All you know is you have to stay afloat”.
Roth’s work is informed by her own struggles with anxiety and depression, as well as Buddhist concepts of the bardos, hungry ghosts, and hell realms – transitional states where beings caught in desire yearn for rebirth. It is in these otherworldly spaces that Roth finds her most compelling imagery. Luminous, cirrus-white brushstrokes trace delicate layers across murky atmospheres, suggesting the faint, compassionate presence of an unseen force. These forms, both biological and spectral, emerge from an undefined zone dissolving and reforming before the viewer's eye. Adapting a form of automatic surrealism, Roth works spontaneously allowing the colors and compositions to materialize through the tactile process of layering paint rather than beginning with a predetermined image. The fluidity of her method invites the paint to lead her, creating works that are at once a surrender to intuition and a deliberate exploration of the unknown.
Both Roth’s process and visual discourse reflect the influence of key abstract and surrealist artists. Like Wassily Kandinsky, who sought to express the spiritual through the abstract. Roth imbues her works with an emotional resonance that transcends their physical form. Georgia O'Keeffe’s sense of isolation, abstraction of natural forms, and use of color are evident in Roth’s atmospheric compositions, where organic shapes hover and pulse in quiet tension. Perhaps the strongest visual dialogue is shared with Cuban-American artist Rafael Soriano, whose dreamlike use of form and color echoes in Roth’s ability to render the intangible, allowing forms to emerge from an almost formless field. Soriano, who received a spiritual revelation in a dream, began painting in a style transformed from pure geometric abstraction into the oneiric, luminous gradations of light and shadow evident in Roth’s work.
Born in 1994 in Milanville, PA, Ada Roth began her artistic practice in 2021 while studying at the New York Studio School. She developed a unique visual language that explores themes of emergence and transformation. Squeezing The Ocean is an invitation to witness the artist’s continual journey into her own emotional and spiritual depths. The paintings ask the viewer to grapple with the unknown while offering fleeting moments of lightness and the ephemeral. Roth’s work is a testament to the exploratory properties of painting; as spaces and forms begin to reveal themselves, the paint leads and Roth follows.
THE LIVING ROOM is the street facing exhibition space at DIMIN. Ada Roth’s exhibition will run concurrently with Erick Alejandro Hernández’s Facing a Forward Wind in the main gallery.