Oliver Coran

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

I’m a 34-year-old Jewish trans man from Philadelphia. I live and work in Berlin. For eleven years I have painted on large sheets of transparent plastic, working on both sides so that the foregrounds and backgrounds overlap. The surface is flexible and lets light through. Wherever a painting is hung, the wall behind it becomes part of the image and changes it, so the image is always changing and the figure never fully settles into it. Sometimes the paintings resemble me, and sometimes the image refers to me, but I don’t use the word self-portrait. I'm interested in the distance between an image and what it refers to. My current show at Lars Friedrich in Berlin is mostly female nudes on canvas, with one larger painting on plastic. They come from another part of me, and they’re what I'm looking at. With the plastic, the instability comes through the support and the transparent material itself. With the canvas, I'm trying to get there through the image itself. I'm realizing that the image never fully coincides with what it refers to. Like there isn't a face, and the hair dissolves into pencil lines. That's why, in the studio these past months, the canvases felt like they were answering back to the large plastic work. It made me understand why the way we hung that painting matters so much to the show, especially the way it starts to slide off the wall.

Artwork