Rema Ghuloum California, b. 1978

Rema Ghuloum's practice situates itself within the lineage of abstract painting while questioning its boundaries through a sustained engagement with time, perception, and the material conditions of image-making. Each painting is the result of a slow, iterative process in which thin layers of pigment are applied and sanded down, allowing the residue of earlier gestures to persist as spectral traces. This accumulation and erasure produce surfaces that seem to breathe-at once luminous and sedimented-recording both the artist's hand and the passage of time.

Her chromatic fields invite prolonged observation. Within them, depth is never stable: colour fluctuates, and spatial registers expand and collapse. The paintings hover between optical and tactile experience, merging the precision of high modernist opticality with the sensibility of post-war abstraction. This duality-the interplay of control and release, structure and intuition-anchors Ghuloum's inquiry into how perception can carry emotional and temporal resonance.

Edges in her compositions often bear the remnants of prior sessions, marked by loosely applied paint from her palette. These peripheries serve as a visual diary of duration, echoing the notion that painting, for Ghuloum, is as much about what remains as about what appears. Critics have described her works as meditative and atmospheric, inviting viewers into a rhythm of seeing that recalls the perceptual investigations of Agnes Martin, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mary Weatherford while maintaining a distinct sensibility rooted in the Californian light and landscape.

Since completing her MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2010, Ghuloum has developed a consistent exhibition record across the United States and abroad. Her recent solo exhibitions include Atmospheres (2023) and The Sky Has a Thousand Windows (2022) at Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; and When the Day Is Done (2023) at David De Boer Gallery, Antwerp. She has participated in group presentations at institutions and galleries such as the Long Beach Museum of Art, Forest Lawn Museum (Los Angeles), Et al. (San Francisco), Sargent's Daughters (New York), and Meyer Reigger (Berlin).

Her work forms part of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, and has been widely reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, CARLA, the Los Angeles Times, Fabrik, and LA Weekly. Ghuloum currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where her studio practice continues to evolve through an ongoing dialogue between gesture, duration, and the perceptual conditions of light.