Artist Statement

Amrita Virdi (she/her) is a Mississauga based artist. She works in a Surrealist, Abstract Expressionist style, working in a wide range of mediums, often deployed through collage. Her work evokes illogical, dreamlike scenes which are narrative based and tell stories revolving themes of societal and cultural discourses. Amrita has received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College.

After completing her undergraduate degree, she has been focused on sharing her experience and knowledge with the Mississauga Community. She currently works at a Montessori as an Art Teacher to create comfortable spaces for all to create with confidence and love. Her goal is that her students make art that is fun and important to them.

In her own practise, Amrita enjoys experimenting with colour and creating abstract backgrounds that have a whimsical dreamlike feeling. After Amrita creates an abstract background, she collages found images together to createsurreal stories. When the images are added to the painting they are stripped of their original content and painted over. This overpainting locks the images into their new home, and detaches them from their cultural or advertising narratives. The repurposed images work beside each other and with the background to complicate our ideas and perceptions of our work-a-day realities. Amrita disrupts everyday images that stimulate our attention, with strange new colours and forms that make the viewer question what you are looking it. The combination of cursive paint and found images are windows into a conditional perceptions of the social worlds she moves through. Her paintings are layers of how she perceives a limitless universe, she adds her own struggles, pain, love, and laughter, which through your eyes will change to become something different.