Amer Kobaslija
Boy with Parrot, 2018
Oil on aluminum
57 x 48 inches
AKop 285
Amer Kobaslija
Lowe's Tubes, Ichetucknee, 2019
Oil on aluminum
96 x 108 inches
AKop 281
Amer Kobaslija
3/19 X, Kesennuma Port II, 2011
Oil on zinc panel
24 x 54 3⁄4 inch
AKop 164
Amer Kobaslija
Street Musicians, Tangerine Sky
2020
Oil on aluminum
18 x 15 inches
AKop 295
Amer Kobaslija
Scarecrow with Ducks
2019
Oil on aluminum
20 1/8 x 15 1/8 inches
AKop 298
Amer Kobaslija
Janitor's Closet II
2007
Oil on panel
93 3/4 x 73 inches
AKop 47
Amer Kobaslija was born in Banja Luka, Bosnia, in 1975. With the outbreak of the Bosnian War in 1993, he escaped to Germany where he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. After tensions from the war eased, he was reunited with his family and they immigrated to the United States, settling in Florida in 1997. He earned a BFA from Ringling College of Art, FL in 2003 and an MFA from Montclair State University, NJ in 2005. He currently lives and works in Orlando and is a professor of painting at the University of Central Florida.
Kobaslija’s paintings are meditations on spaces and environments, “always about mark-making, mind-mapping, and self-examination.” He begins his paintings on a miniature scale and progressively develops the image at larger and larger scales, eventually creating several iterations of the same subject. Some of his earliest subjects were empty spaces, often artist studios or gritty restrooms, which he painted from vertiginous angles, seemingly looking down at the room as if from the viewpoint of a security camera. Although his studios are always vacant, their interiors are cluttered and evidently lived-in, acting as allegorical portraits of the people who inhabited them. In 2010 he was invited to visit the artist Balthus’ studio in Rossenier, Switzerland, which resulted in a body of work depicting both the artist’s studio and the surrounding landscape. Following the 2011 tsunami in Japan, he began an extensive series to document the wreckage, eventually making several trips to the country to witness the aftermath firsthand. Throughout, his work has been about a “sense of place” and the sensation of being in or having a connection to an environment. Beauty is also a preoccupation of his, and a particular quality of his paintings is the sensuous treatment he gives to otherwise desolate settings. Most recently, Kobaslija has been developing a series of portraits as part of an extensive body of work on the state of Florida. He views the state as his adopted homeland and these paintings are a reflection of his appreciation of its culture and people, coupled with his concerns over the impending effects of climate change and the rapidly encroaching urban sprawl on natural environments.
Kobaslija has exhibited internationally and participated in several residencies, including an artist residency and subsequent exhibitions in Brig, Switzerland in 2017. In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art by the Orlando Museum of Art. Other significant awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2005, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. His work is in major public collections such as the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara; the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga; Staten Island Museum, New York; and the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brussels, Belgium.
For Amer Kobaslija, location is everything. A self described “stranger,” Amer has lived and worked around the world, from his native Bosnia, throughout Europe, the United States and Japan.
We sat down with Amer Kobaslija on the occasion of his eighth exhibition at the gallery, In Passing, to discuss his adopted home state of Florida and how his current body of work came to fruition.
With summer turning into fall, the “back to school” season is on us though under radically different circumstances than ever before. Last spring, those of our artists who are also full-time professors had to make the abrupt and difficult transition to online teaching.
Following the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan, Amer Kobaslija arranged to visit the town of Kesennuma in the Miyagi Prefecture, with the aim of chronicling the aftermath.
We are pleased to present our first online viewing room, as part of the ADAA Member Viewing Rooms in collaboration with Artlogic.
While isolating at home with his family, Amer Kobaslija has discovered inspiration in the experience, painting away in a self-described "fever state" expanding on his recent series of figures set in the Florida landscape and revisiting an old subject: his own studio.
An artwork we've been thinking of recently is Amer Kobaslija's Painter's Floor with Chair and Ladder, 2005.
Paintings by Amer Kobaslija are on view in Outside: In at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jackonsville, FL.
On the occasion of his solo exhibition at the gallery, In Passing, Amer Kobaslsija was interviewed by the Motreal Review about his personal background, working process and inspirations behind his recent work.
We're pleased to be participating in the annual Chelsea Gallery Walk, organized by the ADAA. Joined by nearly 30 other galleries in the neighborhood, we will remain open until 8pm for a rare opportunity to see our exhibition after-hours.
Amer Kobaslija is included in a group exhibition at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens. Eclectic Ecology: Landscape Perspectives from Ponce De León to Florida Man surveys how artists over time have engaged with the Floridian cultural landscape. Since Jacques le Moyne, the first European artist known to have visited Florida, arrived in 1564, artists have wrestled with how to capture this dichotomy between the natural landscape and its inhabitants in their depictions of the state.
Amer Kobaslija's recent solo exhibition Florida Noir at Arthur Roger Gallery was reviewed by Francesca Aton for Art in America. The article examines the nuances and references in Kobaslija's new body of work surveying Florida's cultural and natural landscapes. Aton writes "Kobaslija’s scenes of hunters and police officers patrolling forlorn lands suggest a postapocalyptic world, but his paintings also envision quotidian experiences during a slow-moving ecological crisis, with desolate landscapes inhabited by families, children, and pets."
Enrique Chagoya, Amer Kobaslija, and Andrew Lenaghan have works included in a group exhibition at the Oakland University Art Gallery. Your Very Own Paradise offers a conduit to inspire the viewer to repose in a visual culture that is less pessimistic and more open to the abundance of a positive and inclusive world view. Including over a dozen artists, this exhibition serves as a visual break from the tumultousness of our times.
A long-form article on Amer Kobaslija's current exhibition Florida Diaries is featured in Oslobodjenje, one of the most iconic publications based in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Irfan Hosic writes "the "Florida Diaries" series is an integral part of [Kobaslija]'s psychological tissue, in which the experience of violent relocation and alienation, as well as voluntary acceptance and rapprochement, is permanently recorded."
Our exhibition of new paintings by Amer Kobaslija is reviewed in Hyperallergic. "With a documentarian’s eye," Edward Gómez writes, "a stylist’s deft handling of his materials, and a local’s appreciation for his subjects, Kobaslija again demonstrates that his art may be seen simultaneously as landscape painting, portraiture, and a form of contemporary history painting."
The Orlando Museum of Art has recently announced that Amer Kobaslija is one of ten artists artists for the 2019 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art. Organized and curated by the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA), the Florida Prize exhibition brings new recognition to the state’s most compelling and progressive artists. Artists range from emerging to mid-career, and each is engaged in exploring significant issues of contemporary art and society in original and visually exciting ways.
Amer Kobaslija's solo exhibition Spirit of Place is on view at the Lycoming College Art Gallery. The show features small-scale, tightly executed oil paintings of Kobaslija's cluttered art studios from a bird’s eye view, along with recent landscapes inspired by travels to Florida, Japan and Switzerland. Painted in oil, the seemingly idyllic scenes are charged with turbulent histories.
Amer Kobaslija's upcoming solo exhibition The Fear of the Unknown opens September 16th at the Galerie zur Matze in Brig, Switzerland and will run through October 22nd. The show is a part of the 2017 Wallis Triennale, a national exhibition which focuses on Swiss art, as well as other European artists. Kobaslija was invited to represent Brig after his residency last year at AiR Brig.
The Ringling College of Art and Design will be exhibiting a survey of paintings by Amer Kobaslija in the Willis Smith Galleries from January 15 to Feburary 20, 2016. A Ten Year Survey highlights the various subjects that have occupied artist Amer Kobaslija over the last decade, including views of Kesennuma, Japan where the tsunami came ashore in 2011, his personal studio, Bathus' studio, and landscapes of Switzerland and Florida.
Our survey exhibition of painting by Amer Kobaslija has been reviewed by Hovey Brock for the Brooklyn Rail. Brock writes: "The twenty-two paintings in this ten-year survey of Amer Kobaslija’s work at the George Adams Gallery varied widely in size. The two largest were well over six feet across, while the smallest measured three-and-a-half inches to a side. The subject matter fell roughly into two buckets: interiors with the flattened perspective of a fish-eye lens, and panoramic, often equally distorted views of desolate or ruined landscapes—Kobaslija’s “spaces” and “places.” For all these scenes, people were noticeably absent, as if they represented empty stages waiting for an entrance. In a few exceptions there was at most a solitary figure in the picture, usually with his or her back turned. Kobaslija’s virtuosic paint handling—the true dramatis personae—united this body of work. While the larger pieces had wonderful passages, the densely packed brushwork of the very smallest paintings was electrifying..."
We are excited to anounce the publication of a new monograph on the life and work of Amer Kobaslija, the first of its kind. The monograph includes essays by Michael Amy, Edward M. Gomez and Patterson Sims, as well as an interview with the artist and 102 color plates.
Amer Kobaslija and Kako Ueda are included in Objects to be Contemplated at the Selby Gallery at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL. The exhibition focuses on the notion that the average art viewer spends 27 secounds looking at a work of art, highlighting artworks which encourage viewers to spend more time with it.
