Kuzana Ogg

Alula Borealis

2023

Kuzana Ogg's (b.1971, Bombay, India) practice and aesthetics are guided by ideas of balance and restraint. Her early years in India were flooded with noise, color, and fragrance. Her grandparents’ home in Bombay was buffered from the outside chaos of people and cars by lush gardens. This paradise of quietly growing coconut trees, exotic lilies, and newly-turned wet, red earth were invaded hourly by squalling parrots and barbarous crows. Their cries filtered through the foliage as though they were the softened echoes of the havoc on the streets. The general pandemonium of Bombay in the early 1970s serves as her primary visual alphabet with subsequent travels and migrations (living for extended periods in England and South Korea) allowing her alphabet to recombine, developing into a painterly language. Kuzana has participated in 8 residencies -- most recently a 4-year experience at El Zaguan on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico with others in Minnesota, Sri Lanka, China, Scotland, Latvia, and Iceland. She will return to New York to be a R&F Handmade Paints Artist-in-Residence in May 2023. Her paintings have been included on the sets of both television shows and feature films—the most recent of which are Where’d You Go Bernadette, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Southpaw, and My All-American. Kuzana's first solo museum exhibition was Oil at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2014. A second solo followed shortly thereafter, Rev Zero at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 2015. Kuzana's work continues to be exhibited, published, and collected both privately and publicly, nationally and internationally.