I make paintings and installations that treat inner life as something structural, like attention, fatigue, memory, and care can harden into rooms, pathways, and systems. I’m less interested in expressing a feeling than in tracking how a mental state reorganizes space: what becomes a boundary, what starts to leak, what repeats, what gets stuck, what keeps migrating. The work isn’t meant to land as a single image with one message. It behaves more like an environment you enter mentally, an interior weather pattern that shifts depending on how you move through it.

My process is improvisational but not random. I build through accumulation: layering, revising, covering, rerouting. Images show up as fragments, signals, objects, marks, bits of architecture, traces of bodies, then get tested for how they hold together. I pay attention to adjacency: what happens when two things sit next to each other too long, when they almost connect but don’t, when a small change redirects the whole structure. Over time, the paintings start to feel less like windows and more like constructed conditions, systems that you can sense even if you can’t fully read them.

Bio

Abby Zhang is a painter and multidisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and has exhibited nationally. Her work explores memory, abstraction, and symbolic fragments through improvisation and layered forms. Abby is a member of Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland and recently completed a residency at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.