Oliver Coran (b.1992 in Philadelphia), lives in Berlin.

Coran has been painting on plastic for ten years, a technique whose references are wide-ranging — from digital screens to 19th-century Japanese reverse glass painting. He has developed a method of painting on both sides of the transparent surface, producing multiple overlapping foregrounds and backgrounds. The transparent surface is not just a support but part of the image itself. It catches light, mirrors, and introduces a delay—something you have to look through. Painting on plastic suspends the image within shifting, disorienting effects that reflect his exploration of perception, recognition, and the slippages between them.

In his paintings, fractured figures and flashes of faces emerge from the colorful, abstract magmas that the artist builds through brushwork, scraping with a blade, and smudging with hands, producing layers upon layers, traces over traces, and accumulations of color and gesture. The figures arise — sometimes Oliver himself, sometimes his muses, materializing to catch the viewer’s attention before disappearing again. Coran’s figures and faces are at once icons sedimented in popular imagination, and unprecedented apparitions, charged with a wild energy, echoing both ecstatic peaks and angst-ridden passages.