Ali Silverstein

Ali moved from California at seventeen to study comparative religion and visual art at Columbia University in New York City. There she studied with two renowned professors: Archie Rand and Thomas Roma. After graduating, she continued to paint in New York and mentored with the artist Chuck Close. In 2003 she moved to London to attend the Slade School of Art.

While at the Slade, Ali was invited to be one of the five inaugural advisors for OUTset, which among other things would go on to form the Frieze Acquisitions Fund – a fund that, partnered with curators, would buy work from the Frieze Art Fair each year to donate to the Tate Modern. Working alongside Elena Foster, Jan Debbaut (TATE), Colin Wiggins (National Gallery), among other dazzling voices of the art world, allowed her to thrive in the antipodes of the art world simultaneously.

While in London, she also produced a short film called “Last Night,” starring Rosamund Pike and Anthony Andrews. The following year, she applied to be one of six young directors to receive a grant from the governor of New Mexico to make a short film. Having only her paintings and a page of ideas to apply with, she was accepted into the program and directed a short film called “10-11,” about the choice a man must make when, from the vantage point of his lover’s bed, he sees the World Trade Center – where he works – on fire. Realizing that everyone, including his wife, thinks he’s dead, an extraordinary opportunity presents itself.

In 2010 Ali began directing her first feature film – a story of impossible love called “Afterglow.” A non-traditional documentary, the project began in 2008 in response to a life-altering event. Keep an eye out for it on the festival circuit in 2012.

In 2011 she also directed her first two music videos - an art form she loves for the way it combines her love for painting and filmmaking. The first video, "Always A Reason," was shot in Iceland for the prodigious Icelandic talent Elin Ey. The second, shot in New Mexico with actor David Ode, was made for the single "Give Up" by Low Roar.

Ali is currently painting and making from her studio in New Mexico.

Ali utilizes strategies to push the edges of language, or what can be named. Her work often asks the question what is the limit of language, as it relates to form? Whether painting “blindly” so that faithfully recorded marks end up scattered and exploded, or using a grid to break up a recognizable whole into abstract shapes of color, her paintings are always a product of direct observation. In fact, the primary “subject” of her work is this observation itself.

These strategies expose, for example, the way “independent” things affect one another in ways that elude language, or create new things for which we have no name. Ambiguous spaces, the way what we perceive to be solid and fixed is actually distorted by the flow of time, that all we can really see are the relationships between things, not the things in themselves, things that are both this and that, or neither this nor that, absence, distortion through relationship – these are all the subjects of the work.

The result is that Ali’s paintings fall across the spectrum of abstraction and representation, often offering a rich visual experience of both simultaneously. The distinction between figure and ground (and whether or not it’s there at all) is only a by-product of the process of observation: sometimes a form has completely emerged, distinct and independent and recognizable; other times, its boundaries not fully enclosed -- it remains connected to its ground like a Siamese twin, permeable.

There is a conceptual backbone to this work that doesn’t overweigh the importance of form and color. An idea (or strategy of observation) can be the genesis of a series of work, but each painting is a different expression of the idea, tied essentially the present moment of observation.