Omar Lalani was raised in Calgary and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Alberta University of the Arts in 2011. He went on to complete his Master’s degree in New York and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Lalani paints with oil on canvas in quick brushstrokes and with a lightness of touch that floats above land, place, and space. His work inhabits the boundary between abstraction and representation, somewhere between the inner mind and the outer landscape. Although clearly informed by the history of expressionism and abstraction, Lalani’s paintings may also be read as portraits of individuals. The personas in his paintings represent a younger generation, in the process of contextualizing their sense of self, place, and meaning in the 21st century.
