as above / so below by Adriana Chychula in Chicago

As a mural artist and painter based out of Chicago, I use oils and acrylics to capture striking contrast and textures that bring viewers into my paintings. My work plays with surrealism and explores themes of transition and transformation, both in subject matter and concept. My first mural is in my own living room, where I painted a boarded up doorway into a cloudscape you can “step into.” That experience pushed me to paint bigger and use my art to travel. My first stop was in Ecuador, where I painted a hostel bedroom into a jungly hideaway. The cloudscape mural also inspired my recent show, PORTALS, where I asked artists to submit concepts for door-sized works that take viewers “anywhere but here.” This ended with a room of unique “portals” into 12 artists’ psyches, whose creative development served as portals to artistic transformation itself.