Gretchen Adel

Gretchen Adel is a Detroit-based painter whose work explores the interplay between creation and destruction, where figures, landscapes, and symbols emerge and dissolve in a state of perpetual flux. Beginning with digital collages that combine photographs of people, places, and objects, she develops complex assemblages that are then translated onto canvas and intuitively reworked, allowing forms and colors to fragment and recombine in unexpected ways. Her layered process becomes a metaphor for cycles of becoming and unbecoming, revealing balance and wholeness within apparent chaos. Adel’s paintings explore dualities, including interior and exterior, stillness and movement, and containment and expansion, while drawing on mythological and natural symbols to investigate feminine consciousness. Shells, flowers, and celestial elements serve as emblems of resilience, self-actualization, and the eternal tension between light and darkness. Figures oscillate between abstraction and legibility, engaging in moments of introspection and quiet strength, their forms continually dissolving and reemerging across the canvas.