Adam Oehlers
“The Fabled”
September 18th – October 17th, 2021
Haven Gallery is honored to present England based artist Adam Oehlers for his fourth solo show, “The Fabled”, at the gallery. “The Fabled” will feature seventeen watercolor paintings that continue Oehlers’s enchanting tales of his curious female protagonist and her furry, scaly and feathered cohorts, as they explore the mysteries and beauty of the natural world. Through the use of fine linework and a penchant for color and light, Oehlers’s captures both narrative and splendor in all the life that encompasses our animate world.
“The Fabled” blends the reverie and marvel of a young and inquisitive mind with the many microcosms that exist and flourish just beyond human civilization. Animals, insects and flora are relative in size to both the female guide and viewer, balancing the developed world with the natural. An even more keen look opens us up to a world of mythology and metamorphosis, as our newly winged Cicerone, rabbits and fox, explore worlds beyond corporeality.
A reminder to us all, that when we look beyond ourselves, there is still much magic, secrets and story to behold.
Artist Statement
Earlier this year I released my book “The Mushroom Garden”. Once I started sending it out into the world my thoughts for my next book started to form. I thought back to the little snippets of stories that had formed from some of my older work and I found that I kept coming back to pieces from my ‘Wilderlands’ collection, which I showed here at Haven back in 2018. I started writing and before I knew it I was lost in this world once again, tying together the pieces of stories that had been sat gathering dust in my head over the years and slowly, one by one, they all began to meet up. They will take place in the wilderness that surrounds the “Mushroom Garden”. This collection that you see here is very much the stepping stones between the “Mushroom Garden” and my new piece “The Wildered Lands”, “The Fabled” is my exploration of the landscapes, the creatures, the legends and the magic that run free in this place.