RUMI RÊVÉ
ABOUT
ARTIST BIO
Rumi Rêvé (b. 1978) is a contemporary abstract artist whose work explores existential tension. She is less interested in perfection than in personal truth, each painting a raw exposé on her truest self and unfiltered emotions.
Rêvé works with mixed media, including charcoal, inks, spray paint, acrylics, and oils, utilizing energetic gestures, drips, highly saturated color, and aggressive mark-making. Her process is deeply intuitive, completely immersive, and highly physical, moving urgently between 8 or more canvases in a studio session. She deliberately controls the threshold of chaos in the later stages of the process, responding to what has emerged, layering, scraping, and reworking in repeated layers of destruction and repair. Her resulting works are imposing and confrontational but somewhere in all that friction, a raw beauty emerges.
Rêvé earned a Bachelor of Science in Visualization from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before working briefly in television and film production in Los Angeles, CA. Years later, a serious autoimmune diagnosis forced her to reexamine her life. Painting allowed her to reset her nervous system by unleashing raw emotion and delving deeper into herself, eventually establishing a full time painting practice. Rêvé currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I create visceral, emotionally volatile abstract paintings. I’m interested in the existential tension between inner experience and external reality, raw emotion and repression, depth and superficiality, surrender and control.
For me, creating is physical and alive, a confrontational explosive force that exposes my most authentic and unfiltered self. Through instinct, fracture, collision, excess, and urgency each layer captures the frequency of my nervous system in the present moment. Only after I've had time to sit with a finished piece does the meaning begin to reveal itself to me, although I don’t dictate how it should be experienced by others. The resulting work is emotionally raw and intensely personal, but for the viewer it may hold an entirely different truth.
STUDIO ASSISTANTS
