SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA.- The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art announces Conundrums, artist Alicia Adamerovich’s debut museum exhibition, on view June 6 – October 20, 2026.
Conundrums brings together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that reveal a futuristic natural world. Growing up near the forests of Pennsylvania with a carpenter father and biologist mother, Adamerovich developed a deep curiosity about and relationship with nature. Her paintings play with space in strange and sincere ways: shadows carve out hills and valleys across surfaces; mysterious light sources emerge, and sculptural elements such as wax, pumice, and sand build paintings into three-dimensional spaces.
Adamerovich has described her practice as abstract rather than surrealist — she draws from everyday life more often than from dreams, which are a key feature of surrealism. Her sculptures blend traditional painting and natural elements, bringing together materials like maple wood, forged steel, copper, and resin in combinations that feel mid-transformation, as if they are in the process of becoming something else. Works like Diva and Kissing Me! bring in feminist visual language, and titles throughout employ double meanings that add humor and whimsy. In works like Choking on My Words and Blissful Ignorance, nothing is quite settled — and that’s the point. Adamerovich wants her work to stay open, not to give answers, but to hold onto the mystery of the natural world and invite you to sit with it.
Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, says: “We are thrilled to present Alicia Adamerovich’s debut museum exhibition at SLOMA. Conundrums is a remarkable body of work that beautifully captures the strangeness and wonder of the natural world. Adamerovich’s ability to hold mystery and meaning in the same breath makes this an exhibition that will stay with visitors long after they leave.”
Alicia Adamerovich was born in Latrobe, PA, in 1989 and lives and works in New York, NY. She studied art and design at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Pennsylvania State University. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Pangée, Montréal; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; and Sans Titre, Paris. She has also participated in group presentations at Timothy Taylor, Margot Samel Gallery, GRIMM, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Mrs. Gallery in New York; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Yee Society, Hong Kong; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Artpace, San Antonio; and Mana Contemporary, Jersey City. She is the recipient of the 2022 LCA Prize for Emergent at MiArt, Milan, and has held residencies at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; Moly-Sabata Artist Residency, Albert Gleizes Foundation, Sablons, France; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy; and Hayama Artist Residency, Japan. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; He Art Museum, Guangdong, China; X Museum, Beijing; and the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas.
