Deborah Pohl’s artistic highlights include winning two Fellowships for painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, one in 2022. Deborah is currently featured in the NJ State Museum’s Re-emergence exhibit. Deborah’s numerous exhibitions include solo shows at the Hoboken Historical Museum and the Trenton City Museum (awarded by the director of the Aljira Gallery, Newark), and dozens of group shows including the Jersey City Museum, Barrett Art Center (Poughkeepsie), City Without Walls, (Newark), Women’s Made Gallery (Chicago) and the
AIR Gallery (DUMBO). Deborah’s solo show at the Trenton City Museum was reviewed by the New York Times.
Deborah Pohl received a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Deborah’s painting education continues, as she still takes courses to hone her technique. Being inspired by the atelier movement of the last decade, Deborah has been taking painting courses
at the Florence Art Academy, the Grand Central Atelier, and the Arts Students League. Her educational life includes receiving a master’s in counseling and helping Deborah in her desire to create compositions that speak to our humanity and our sense of longing.
Deborah Pohl has always worked at being a community-based artist, being a part of three collectives over the years: ART (Artists Representing Themselves) with her peers from Rutgers, the Agitators who put together street-based ephemeral arts around the Jersey City area, and the tART Collective which was an intersectional feminist and anti-racist art collective in New York City (see Wikipedia)
Statement:
My paintings occupy the category of still life while working against the genre’s expectations by presenting objects in unfamiliar and surprising compositions. Working solely from real life, I explore light and color as I set up each painting’s composition. The objects themselves are distinctive: Classic still-life objects, like fruit and drapery, are combined with overlooked and often discarded relics of our everyday lives. I use traditional oil painting methods in order to beautify the ignored and mundane. Objects speak to our senses, recalling our interactions with the world, and evoking our memories. Poetic combinations of objects create new meanings and flatten any assumed hierarchies of status. I have always admired still-life painters and have been influenced and moved especially by Audrey Flack, Giorgio Morandi, and Juan Sanchez Cotan.