Pamela Helena Wilson

[7][8][9] In 2013, critic Michelle Grabner wrote, "The luminosity of watercolor on white paper and the alluring atmospheric effects [Wilson] achieves in this medium creates images that are neither photographic or illustrational but seductively abstract and representational.

[2][1][3][9][19] She has shown in surveys including "The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society" (International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville, 2007); "Pacific Light: California Watercolor Refracted, 1907-2007" (Nordic Watercolour Museum, 2007); and "To Bend the Ear of the Outer World" (Gagosian, London, 2023).

[5][9][7] Artforum critic Glen Helfand likened her ambivalent urban images to those of Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter; he wrote, "wavering between reality and metaphor, the sober and the dreamlike ... [they] evoke the pomp of history painting while skirting that genre's didacticism via astute stylistic choices.

"[2] Critics have also related Wilson to figurative artists Marlene Dumas and Peter Doig, abstract painters Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn, and to the pictorial concerns of Post-Impressionism and Social Realism.

[5][1][10] After turning to representation, Wilson produced oil paintings and watercolors depicting her surroundings (interiors, views from windows) as well as found news photos that she first presented in a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery (2002).

[3] She continued to explore both these themes and mediums in her mid-decade shows—at Meloche (2005) and Gallery Paule Anglim (2004, 2008)—offering re-articulations of images of war devastation, floods, accidents or masses of people gathered for political events, protest marches or riots.

Based on 1970s photographs of Soviet-controlled East Germany, "Twilight" rendered the architecture of the DDR in Chinese-landscape influenced brushstrokes; largely divorced from backgrounds and stripped of context, they imply a tension between abstract form and historical consciousness.

[26] The oil and acrylic paintings in "Second Nature" and her exhibition at rosyendpost (2021) depicted hazy apparitions of rural Southern churches (largely clapboard siding, rooftops, steeples) in fields of shifting space and color areas that evoked states of order, disuse or vegetative overgrowth (e.g., Marl Hill Baptist, 2019).