Paul Thiebaud Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Evolution of an idea: diluvia to midden, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Sono Osato, on Saturday, November 15, 2025, from 3 to 5pm, with an artist talk at 3:30pm. On view will be seven paintings and five drawings selected from Osato’s Diluvia and midden Series. Variously rendered in oil, tinted rabbit skin glue, watercolor, gouache, and dry pigments, Osato’s works explore the intersections of language, technology, and archeological time through abstract painting. The exhibition will be on view through January 10, 2026.

Inspired by the impact of eroding topographies on the evolution of visual iconography, and the need to disinter them to reveal histories, Sono Osato’s exhibition charts the latest chapter in her thinking about our technological past and future. In previous series, Osato began mining and recontextualizing the gears, sprockets, and mechanical parts of defunct machines into a visual language for abstraction by embedding the objects within the paint surface. In the Diluvia and midden Series, the physical objects have receded, leaving only their silhouettes and outlines to form each composition.

Osato’s Midden works are composed of layered and overlapping shapes arranged in central clusters that are partially obscured by swaths of paint, as if they were being exhumed in an archeological dig. In the Diluvia paintings, flowing currents are conveyed through dynamic line work, visualizing how flood waters erode the ground to reveal relics of the past. Each series serves as a visual metaphor for the evolutionary forces of technology, and a meditation on how new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, mine through and encapsulate older forms of tech to create themselves. For Osato, these painting are an “incantation calling out to the deepest and most primal pattern within a pattern that humankind will never full see or understand because it is a part of it.” They are also “a kind of collective mortality that we can try to read and resound back to us, so that we can understand ourselves and perhaps each other just a little bit better while we are still here.”