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Caroline Absher: The Silver Cord

Current exhibition
10 April – 23 May 2025 Los Angeles
  • Biography
  • Works
  • Text
  • Q&A
  • Installation Views
  • Biography

    Portrait of Caroline Absher by Elisabet Davidsdottir 2025, LA

    Caroline Absher was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1994. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  

    Absher's recent solo and group exhibitions include “Persona” at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, New York (2025); “Lighting (Striking) Blue” at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden (2024); “City Life” at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (2024); “Blue Dream” at Shrine in Los Angeles, California (2024); “Back to Oz” at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, New York (2023); Tennis Elbow 107 at The Journal Gallery in New York, New York (2022), “Women of Now” at Green Family Art Foundation, Texas (2021), The Armory Show (2022,2023,2024) Independent New York (2024), among others. Absher has participated in artist residencies such as The Macedonia Institute, New York, further expanding her artistic practice. 

    Work by Absher is held in the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art.  

    Caroline Absher lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

  • Works
    • Caroline Absher The Wishing Stone, 2025 Oil on linen 71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      The Wishing Stone, 2025
      Oil on linen
      71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
    • Caroline Absher The Spell, 2025 Oil on linen 71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      The Spell, 2025
      Oil on linen
      71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Angel's Path, 2025 Oil on canvas 71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Angel's Path, 2025
      Oil on canvas
      71 x 59 in (180.3 x 149.9 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Violet (Ether), 2025 Oil on linen 79 x 63 in (200.7 x 160 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Violet (Ether), 2025
      Oil on linen
      79 x 63 in (200.7 x 160 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Childhood's End, 2025 Oil on linen 44 x 63 in (111.8 x 160 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Childhood's End, 2025
      Oil on linen
      44 x 63 in (111.8 x 160 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Scarlet (Earth), 2025 Oil on linen 79 x 63 in (200.7 x 160 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Scarlet (Earth), 2025
      Oil on linen
      79 x 63 in (200.7 x 160 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Twin Flame, 2025 Oil on canvas Diptych 60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm) Each 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Twin Flame, 2025
      Oil on canvas
      Diptych
      60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
      Each 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
    • Caroline Absher Version of a Dream, 2025 Oil on linen 42 x 54 in (106.7 x 137.2 cm)
      Caroline Absher
      Version of a Dream, 2025
      Oil on linen
      42 x 54 in (106.7 x 137.2 cm)
  • Text

    What is an artist supposed to do? 

    Not only are there infinite ways of answering that question, at the moment there are multiple ways of asking it. I mean, like, what does one do in life? Or when a paramilitary coup is dismantling your country’s government and trumpling the rule of law?   

    Like many artists in the first months of this year, the ominous start of the 21st century’s second quarter, the New York painter Caroline Absher felt completely at a loss to grapple with the outside world, a feeling only amplified when working on a new body of work.

    Trying to introduce some calm into her world, Absher started meditating. It helped quiet her mind at first, but soon, to her surprise, it also started bringing her unexpected visions, flashes of memory and insights into her past, both imagined and real—“deeply buried things and beautiful colored shapes along with states of calm I had never achieved,” she says. 

    So not only did it feel natural to start incorporating some of these flashes and shapes into new paintings, Absher took it a step further and began trying to portray the actual processes and motions in her mind of the warring forces and emotions that she was experiencing (since taming them was clearly out of the question).  Becoming almost fully abstract, Absher’s new paintings began to represent various kinds of conflicts that the artist  needed to reconcile on a daily basis. The pink-yellow pastel calm of clarity and order versus the jarring, jagged chaos of unfettered, earth-toned expressiveness. The desire to open and expand one’s curiosity to all fronts versus the need to close, filter and protect one’s inner self from an overwhelm of information. 

    “There’s an interesting soft beauty in these that contrasts with a different anergy and darkness that’s quite violent” says Absher. “And that’s something that I think about all the time, but I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it on purpose in these paintings.”

    Having experienced nearly out-of-body experiences when meditating, Absher also became fascinated with the ancient idea of the silver cord, a mythic link that tethers the human body to its soul. Today it’s a central concept to the theory of astral projection, but to Absher the silver cord has many strands. The daughter of a neuroscientist, Absher believes there are any number of ways to look at the mind-body consciousness that bring new color and depth to its still-mysterious nature. No matter what anyone claims, no form of  science or spirituality has even come close to mastering it yet. 

    In a way, Absher personified the silver cord in her works through vague figural outlines. These ghostly, sketchy presences act almost like mediums in the media, standing in for a perceiving, higher self. They are watchers, to use Absher’s terminology, helping mold, sort, mediate and modulate the cacophony. But they’re far from passive spectators. One rides a horse, one takes winged flight, one curls up with a fox.

    The resulting paintings, fittingly about the size of a doorway, are marked departures from Absher’s more representational works in which human figures were often confronted with eerie hypernatural phenomena like great branching lightning bolts or the aurora borealis. (In those, the silver cord might be perceived as a link between an earthly observer and unearthly phenomena.)

    But even in her works’ new abstract presentation, Absher exults in the way that the eye—the artist’s or the audience’s—seeks for patterns, faces, bodies, and meanings. “One aspect of these works I love is something that only happens in person,” says Absher. “From far away, they’re very abstract, but the closer you get the more you feel your brain tugging at you, asking what am I looking at? What is it? Where is it? And the figures just sort of jump out.” 

    The mind, like the artist, is always trying to inject meaning into what it sees—to try and find if not a happy ending, then at least one that makes some kind of honest and authentic sense of the chaos. 

    That is what an artist is supposed to do.  

    David Colman

  • Q&A

    Caroline Absher Questionnaire 2025
  • Installation Views
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 1
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 2
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 3
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 4
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 5
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 6
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 7
    • Caroline Absher The Silver Cord Installation View 8

45 White Street  New York  NY 10013

9055 Santa Monica Blvd  West Hollywood  CA 90069

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