In Defense of Beauty, an exhibition featuring mixed media works by Chicago artist Allison Svoboda, opens at OS Projects on February 8, 2025 and continues through April 12, 2025. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, February 8, from 1 – 3 pm.

Allison Svoboda’s artwork functions as an extended meditation on our natural environment. At OS Projects, Svoboda will be exhibiting two bodies of related work: “radical” plein air paintings the artist created at various locations in collaboration with bodies of water that are under threat, and torn paper installations from her Mandala series.

Svoboda’s plein air paintings are an ode to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and their watersheds. Svoboda combined water from these sites with water-soluble pigments and exposed the work to water movement, wind and land-derived materials such as sand, salt and plant matter. Akin to automatism practiced by the Dadaists and Surrealists, the paintings are made in a sense from a “spirit hand,” as natural forces and materials are allowed to take over the surfaces

of the works, imbuing them with the intrinsic character of the water and surrounding land.

Like the plein air works, Svoboda’s Mandala series is influenced by organic forms and patterns (such as fractal geometry) and guided by both design and instinct. To create the works in the series, the artist first made hundreds of small paintings with thousands of brushstrokes, after which she collated the paintings, tore out images that align, then constructed from them a visually complex, wall-mounted collage of self-similar shapes. The paper’s ephemeral quality and rhythmic brushwork evoke a Buddhist mandala and encourage extended contemplation.

Predicated on equal doses of inquiry and revelation, Svoboda’s artwork asks us to pay close attention to the dichotomy between destruction and growth that defines the natural world--as well as the fear, braided with wonder, that encapsulates our response to it.

About the Artist

Allison Svoboda’s art practice exists on the edge between intuitive and deliberate mark making. Through paintings, sculpture and installations that are both ethereal and ominous, Svoboda highlights nature’s ability to regenerate, activate, and heal despite the damaged state of our environment. In 2015, she received the Hemera Fellowship to study Zen, calligraphy and shibori in Japan. This meditative practice and mark making continue to influence her work.Svoboda has shown her work at galleries, art centers and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum (Chicago, IL); Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL); Walker Gallery (Denver, CO); K Imperial Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Olson-Larsen Galleries (Des Moines, IA); Fiskars Village (Finland); and Mingara Gallery (Australia). Svoboda’s public art sculptures can be seen at Nashville International Airport and North Center Plaza in Chicago. Her work is in private, corporate and hotel collections throughout the world, including Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco, InterContinental Real Guatemala, and the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi, among others.

Image: Fullmoon Painting #5, by Allison Svoboda, 2022.