Avi Saliman is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in sculptural and drawn media. He earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design and has participated in programs such as the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s Studio Project. As an emerging artist in New York City, Saliman has exhibited work at institutions including Greenpoint Gallery and the Anna Maria & Stephen Kellen Gallery. He previously was studio assistant to multidisciplinary artist, Diana Shpungin, and heavily assisted Shpungin on the execution of her 2022 solo exhibition at Smack Mellon. Born outside of Boulder, Colorado, Saliman moved to New York in 2017.

Saliman’s artwork makes the monumental - unmonumental. His practice aims to explore shifting paradigms of the contemporary world, creating new contexts that exist in the margins of constructed life. The built world is a base from which Saliman’s work creeps into an esoteric exploration of cultural paradoxes and psychological impulses. He relies heavily on artifacts, investigating the histories of their design and interrogating the framework in which they were produced and exist. Dichotomies, multiples, facsimiles, double entendres, contradictions, and other conceptual twins echo through Saliman’s projects. Abstraction is a key tool, but not for its own sake; the specter of representation still haunts many of his most abstract pieces. There is often a goal of confusing the artwork to have it arrive in a liminal state where it’s existing as something which it’s not, a space where Saliman is able to explore mystical ideas through connection to the physical world. The modes of drawing that he employs allow the lines to blur between abstraction, representation, and language. The materials - simple paper, bricks, graphite, color pencil, sewing techniques - allow for a certain humbleness. Sewing at once damages and repairs. The mark and the stitch are poignant ways which Saliman reflects the dichotomies inherent in memory in all its fact and fiction.