Neeraj Sebastian
T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts
ABOUT
Before COA
I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I moved to join the MFA in Studio Art program at UNC Greensboro. During the two years of my studies, the way I painted changed from working observationally to working from my imagination. My journey as a painter began when I took an introductory oil painting class at Fleisher Art Memorial, a community art center in Philadelphia. This was a major shift from molecular and cell biology, which is what I focused on during and after my undergraduate studies, but science is also a speculative process like painting and my past experience continues to inform my work today. I spent my childhood in Hamburg, Germany and Bangalore, India, before moving to Philadelphia. Before Greensboro, I was in Bangalore, and my time in the city—the architecture, the people, the stories—continues to be a strong presence in my work.
Course Areas
Drawing, Painting, Studio Art
Personal Website
COURSES
EDUCATION
- MFA, Studio Art, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2022
- BS, Biological Sciences, Drexel University, 2011
HONORS & AWARDS
INTERESTS
The images in my work are informed by personal experiences, questions about the role of the individual in the context of community and society, myths and dreams. I consider questions of inclusion and exclusion: young men who find themselves without a place in the world and, feeling a need to assert themselves, embark on self-destructive paths; I draw from myths, in particular creation stories, in which a violent act often precipitates the reemergence of life. The couple-form, a man and a woman, recurs in my work; in these paintings I portray both the closeness and the distance that exists between people who are otherwise completely intimate. The settings for my work range from mythological dream-spaces to domestic spaces. My paintings are often dense with paint and also hold the history of their own making, with exploratory marks and traces of earlier directions, embedded in the surface of the finished paintings.
EXHIBITIONS
2023: A Room with a View, Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Constellations (with Jill Beth Hannes), Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC
2022: Presence: North Carolina Figurative Artists, Greenhill Center for NC Art, Greensboro, NC; Annual Juried Exhibition, First Street Gallery, New York City, NY, Juror: Clintel Steed; UNCG MFA Thesis Exhibition, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Belonging and Distance (MFA Thesis Exhibition), Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC (solo exhibition)
2021: 13th Annual Juried Exhibition, Prince Street Gallery, New York City, NY, Juror: Sangram Majumdar; Nothing to Lose: Drawing as a Speculative Process, Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC
2020: Fumes: Cruising, Coasting, Refueling, Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC
2018: Powercut, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
2016: 118th Annual Student Exhibition, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA