Exhibitions —

april april is pleased to present Atlas, a solo exhibition by Pittsburgh-born and -based artist Owen Westberg. This is his first solo exhibition in the city.

In Atlas, Westberg proposes a new idiom for still-life painting and plein-airism not strictly indulged in arrangement, splendor, or capturing subject aura. In each painting, a container for experience is ushered toward a soft chasm of abstraction. Behind the curtains of physicality, Westberg emphasizes matter as an energetic fluid that keeps the psyche’s lights on.

Images here are akin to fumbling for a cell phone’s glow to look at the text of a menu, where pattern repeats across axes of their planes, much like hush Tiffany pendants hover above the booths of a vintage restaurant.

In some of them, icons drift into view like clouds might—amid an image-cadence of recognizable scenes of gardens, plowed fields, a flower held scant in a measuring cup, respite. One imagines looking up while lying down in the Allegheny Cemetery, squinting to extrude clear ideas from loose shapes, mediated by an atmosphere stained with industrial hues and an intoxicating, sloshing sunlight. Their surfaces lift and bog, occasionally quenching a characteristic, blondish glow with thick, overgrown-pond-blues and deep greens.

By twilight, memory slides along spectral rays toothlessly. If light is real enough to see, it’s all that’s there. An atlas already fails to capture it, necessarily a temporary zone of engagement.

Owen Westberg (b. 1986, Pittsburgh, PA) lives and works in Pittsburgh. He received his MFA in Painting from Columbia University and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Thicket at TOPS, Memphis, TN (2025) and Lake at Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY (2023). Westberg has been included in group exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY; Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh, PA; Dunes, Portland, ME; Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, NY, among others.