Sheila Nicolin

Country where you live:

City where you live:

Statement : 

Sheila Nicolin is a painter based between Detroit and NYC, who explores the very human struggle to find intimate connection. Narrated from a naive and voyeuristic perspective, Sheila’s paintings create surrealist glimpses into authentic and vulnerable experiences surrounding loneliness, mental illness and desire. 

All of Sheila’s works are studied and imagined in real time, but distorted and edited subjectively in the same nature as memory. As she interacts with friends, family and acquaintances, she studies and documents via photography, writing and sketching. Her work acts as an actively-lived retrospective, a fictionalized reality and an attempt to understand those around her. The human form is represented in a way akin to wilderness: both familiar and inviting, but also alien and wildly inaccessible. Using expressive mark-making, garish color and dissociative pattern, Sheila creates an unreliable and sometimes skewed story of intimacy. This work exists as a unique marriage between a commercial design background and a focused artistic vision, which results in a body of work that reimagines traditional pop art through the generational lens of overwhelmed and disjointed interactions within a world of constant stimulation. This humanist appeal to the universal “you” builds a coming-of-age narrative with a relatable goal: to find honest connection with other humans in the most humanly flawed way—dishonestly and skewed and drenched in contemporary culture.

Somewhere Great
Paradisical
Un-glowed Up
They're Hanging Me Tonight
Waiting For [Godot, Wednesday, Armaggedon]
Bio: 

Sheila Nicolin is a painter with an emphasis on portraiture and pattern. Within her artistic practice, she incorporates her commercial background as an illustrative designer through bold pattern and color. Sheila received her BFA in Illustration from the College for Creative Studies in 2018, where she was awarded the Imre J. Molnar Artistic Achievement Award, appointing her as merit-based valedictorian. After graduating from her undergraduate program, Sheila initially began working as a pattern designer and art director for clients including Walmart, The Home Depot and Lowe's. After leaving this corporate position to pursue painting full-time, Sheila launched her first body of work, "Fresh Squeezed" at KO Studio Gallery in Hamtramck, MI in March of 2019. Sheila has also shown her work at Valade Gallery, Red Bull House of Art, and the Society of Illustrators. Sheila's work has been showcased by publications and blogs including Booooooom, Supersonic Art and The Metropolitan. She has worked with corporate clients to commission private artworks and murals including The Platform, Broder & Sachse, and Kresge Arts Detroit, and she was also a part of Bright Walls Mural Festival in September of 2019. Within this coming year, Sheila has an upcoming solo show, "Naive," at UUU Art Collective in Rochester, NY and a three-person group show, "Depth of Field," at PLAYGROUND DETROIT, as a Knight Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient.

USA
PITTSBURGH
Germany
Berlin
United States
Seattle
india
NEW DELHI
Ireland
Cork

Pages

___________________________________________________________________

Submit for Artist of the month

art jobs