Bio:

Danielle Adina Nordenberg (b. 1996, MA) is a queer, first-generation painter, gardener, and designer of Lithuanian-Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish heritage based in Boston. Their work explores authenticity and what it means to reveal the (un)real by weaving together fantastical and representational imagery using fearless palettes. Tight marks orbit fragmentation and longing, tracing what grows when you know enough to name the pain but not enough to absolve it. A patchwork process, images arise intuitively and from narrative, sketches and photos stitched frequently into references. Out of place imagery, loud chromatic density, and a caricatured carving of surface settle into an eerie tone. Nordenberg’s work has been shown at the Fay Chandler Exhibition by the City of Boston, Midway Artist Gallery in Boston, Shockboxx Gallery in LA, and The Canvas in NYC.  They have taught at the Garfield School through the City of Revere and organized interdisciplinary experimental art programs at The Foundry, spanning movement, cinematography, painting, and poetry. Professionally, Nordenberg has worked in digital archives, gallery assistance, and horticulture/design.

statement:

Danielle Adina Nordenberg's work, influenced by their family's Soviet and refugee experience and their own queer and disabled histories, explores themes of authenticity and the (un)real. Their paintings weave together realism with fantastical elements to create dreamlike narratives inviting viewers into spaces of subtle discomfort. Growing up amidst ableism, homophobia, and generational disconnections their early coping mechanism of transfiguring negative spaces evolved into a refusal to see absence as lack, animating the ambiguous in-betweens. Personal experiences, conversations, and sensations are assembled into surreal forms often derived from digitally collaging images and drawings. The consonance of bright colors with out-of-place imagery creates an eerie tone. Their vibrant palette, and almost cartoon-ish, “unserious” compositions challenges conventional notions of validity and knowledge, relishing the mysterious and resisting confinement. Nordenberg’s creations serve as an homage to everything that defies categorization, seeking to preserve the tenderness of all that roams within the strange and uncertain.

Their work is largely influenced by working as an EMT, in a nursing home, growing up with disability, generational trauma and cycles of abuse rooted in a long eastern european lineage surviving Russian colonialism as well as the Holocaust. They are interested in displacements as they occur in memory, culture, and body and localized replications of the structural. They are further interested in exploring the healing that happens in the cracks when one loses access to their history, what can grow in the severed. Their work is often rooted in narratives or conversations and invoke bright colors alongside a “childish” sensibility. Nordenbergs work pedestals frill, fringe, cringe, and kitsch as it translates the verbal into the imaginary frame— not as avoidance but as encounter.