Brooklyn based painter and sculptor Annabelle Abel (b. 2001) informs her work from her childhood in Texas and relationship with womanhood, as a means to question what the feminine is. With themes of comfort in the nostalgia of unreliable memory, her work turns the present into the past. The implied movements of inanimate objects signal their inhabitance by complicated, and perhaps, painful memories. Her figurative works echo with feelings of prayer and worship - exploring their respective relationships to sexuality. 

Abel creates a restless psychological realm where the chains that bind or perhaps hold together notions of feminine beauty are corset laces, rosaries, and twisted ribbons. Her body of work utilizes oil paint and polymer clay to depict devotional objects paired with precarious figurative sensuality. This contrast creates a dissonance which suggests that there could perhaps be more at stake than would be comfortable to accept. In Abel’s world, a spiritual nostalgia pulls us into a pictorial world where a disquieted beauty challenges us to look even closer.

Annabelle Abel is a multimedia artist born in 2001 in Austin, Texas, and currently resides in Brooklyn. Her work primarily consists of oil paintings, as well as polymer clay sculpture. Her practice is self taught and focuses on themes of sensuality, nostalgia in unreliable memory, and devotion. Her exhibitions include group show “Salon Classon”, a private viewing in BK (2025), “222” at The Living Gallery (2024), "Summer Solstice" at Kaleidoscope gallery BK (2024) from Chainmail Art Collective and "Sunlight" a group show at The Living Gallery, Brooklyn (2023).