L'Almanach 26 : Autumn Ramsey | Consortium Museum

Autumn Ramsey (1976, USA)

Born in 1976, Autumn Ramsey lives and works in Chicago. She develops a unique body of pictorial work that is both introspective and poetic, in which a fluid and interconnected vision of the living world undermines the boundaries between the human and non-human, the visible and invisible.
Combining pictorial structure, intuition, and imagination, she creates images in which a balance between mastery and incompleteness opens up an expanded space of perceptual experience.

For her exhibition at the Consortium Museum, the artist is presenting her recent compositions (2024-2025) that evoke proliferating environments resembling gardens or autonomous ecosystems. These works are peopled with human, animal, and vegetal figures intertwined and layered with vibrant and translucent materials. Composed of organisms moving through spaces without any clear hierarchy, her paintings tend towards abstraction and convey a feeling of constant movement, like a mutating world.

This can be seen in A Perennial (2024) and Feral (2025), in which the painted figures remain in the center but are transformed, dissolved, or camouflaged in vaporous backgrounds, creating a tension between appearance and disappearance. The viewer is submerged in a paradoxical space that is dense yet elusive, where visual and logical points of reference are deliberately blurred. This ambivalence runs through her entire body of work, in which domination and vulnerability, production and destruction coexist. These interconnected figures and organisms create a painting of metamorphosis, in which human beings turn into flowers, flowers into beasts, or beasts into flowers. Ambivalent lights, hues, and textures also reveal the artist’s mastery of oil painting.

Her paintings invite us to rethink our relationship to bodies and the world, which the artist often addresses in her oeuvre—themes of identity construction and the cultural trend of merely looking at the surface of things without exploring what lies behind what is immediately seen.