Paola Oxoa (b. 1979, Medellín, Colombia) is an American artist whose work records and reflects moments of awareness. Through her work, she seeks to understand the world within and without. By merging landscape and the body as fluid containers of shared energies, she bypasses representing what is seen in favor of what is felt, intuited, or understood. Oxoa’s work synthesizes and communicates perceptual experience via the formal elements of art.
Oxoa’s recent paintings center on a singular visual form developed privately over more than a decade. The form first appeared in 2013, following an experience while traveling in a dugout canoe, where she registered the dissolution of boundaries between her body and the surrounding environment. The resulting awareness of energetic continuity remains a central premise of her practice. In 2023, after an extended period of drawing, she began painting with this form. Her process is structured and intentional, attuned to the energy perceived in the environment and body at the time of making. The surface of each painting records these conditions, indexing shifts in presence through the application of paint. Oxoa’s work engages the legacy of postwar abstraction and systems-based practices. The form operates less as a motif than as a vessel—an architecture through which perceptual, energetic, and temporal states may be transmitted. Her practice is shaped by broader inquiries into structure, language, and non-verbal modes of communication.
Oxoa has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO; Stay Gallery, Denver, CO; and Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY. Her work has been included in numerous group shows, including those at The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT; MCA Denver, CO; White Columns, New York, NY; Harper’s Apartment, New York, NY; Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY; My Pet Ram, New York, NY; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; High Energy Constructs, Los Angeles, CA; and PFA Gallery, Washington, DC. She was awarded the first New Pick Residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, in 2004. Her work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, NYLON Magazine, Art in America, Artillery Magazine, Rocky Mountain News, and The Denver Post, among other publications. Oxoa’s work is held in the permanent collection of the Bass Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami Beach, FL. She received her BFA in animation from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2004.
Oxoa founded the artist run, Mother Gallery within her studio in Beacon, NY, in 2018. Her curatorial work via Mother has been featured or reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Two Coats of Paint, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, Whitewall, and The New York Times. Mother Gallery closed in the winter of 2025. Paola Oxoa lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.