Presenting
Dana Oldfather: De Novo
March 14th – April 18th 2025
Opening reception Friday, March 14th from 6 – 8pm
Abattoir is thrilled to present the gallery’s second exhibition of paintings by Dana Oldfather, De Novo. Oldfather is a landscape painter whose work conjures the universal and specific at once, translating the browns and greens of Northeast Ohio’s forests into fervid otherworldly set pieces ripe with drama. Her paintings of dense forest, underbrush, and lush meadows vary in scale from intimate close-up to distant view, rendered in otherworldly palettes selected, it seems, to underscore the magical within Nature.
Oldfather, a Cleveland area native, has mined this subject now for several years. Moving away from abstraction as a subject, she imbues the treetops and meadows in her new paintings with brushwork suggesting her deep knowledge and respect for modernism.Unique to the work is Oldfather’s ability to render places familiar to many—the Metroparks, Chardon fields and forests—with an eerie other worldliness that transports one to places beyond. Convening layered and multiple worlds is the artist’s intention, as she states,
“I communicate the dilemma of being through landscape. I bring my insides to bear on the outside and trepidation colors the scene. Broodingly, the atmosphere is thick, and the landscape psychedelically tinted like dawn, an eclipse, or a summer storm. Flora glows and becomes bulbous and fleshy, petal-like and feathery in the waning light. Reality is more than it seems. One follows the receding landscape out and away only to wash up again at the shores of one’s skin; hope; longing; loss. While building other worlds, the sense of my impermanence in an expansive, mysterious universe stretches out into broader context and I am free.”
Dana Oldfather is a painter who has exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, including Library Street Collective, Detroit, Zg Gallery, Chicago, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, New York, moCa Cleveland, and The University of Southern Queensland, in Australia. She was awarded the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a Satellite Fund Emergency Relief Grant from SPACES Gallery, The Warhol Foundation, and The Cleveland Foundation, and was a finalist for the Hopper Prize. Oldfather has been published in magazines and journals including Dovetail, Beautiful/Decay, and ArtMaze Magazine. Her paintings can be found in many public and corporate collections in the US including Eaton Corporation, MGM International, Bedrock Detroit, The Cleveland Clinic, and the Progressive Art Collection. Dana Oldfather currently works and lives just outside Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Randall and son Arlo.
