Paul Fosaaen

Bio

Paul Fosaaen is an American painter from North Dakota living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He moved to Minnesota in 2007 to study art history and painting at the University of Minnesota. Under the instruction of three-dimensional painter David Feinberg, Fosaaen expanded his painterly practice into dimensional art and process-based art. From 2009 to 2016, he volunteered and exhibited at the Soap Factory, a contemporary art gallery focused on site-specific and experimental installation art. Since 2020, Fosaaen has focused primarily on three-dimensional painting and painterly processes which allow for mindfulness practices.

Statement

I work in three-dimensional and flat painting to practice mindfulness and discuss topics like biology, human history, and metacognition. My process involves taking something malleable—fabric stapled loosely to a canvas, paper adhered haphazardly to a surface, or fluid paint sifted through a permeable sheet of paper_­­—and finding a concrete form through these arbitrarily performed processes. I see this transformation from the vague to the substantial as analogous to our existential apprehension of the world. A series of atoms, an intersection of planes, a group of shapes become tangible objects through the mediation of our perception. The creation of my forms from their disordered origins to ordered composition speaks to my understanding of the common thread that ties together our histories: that all things are shaped by chance.