Born in Israel and raised in Atlanta for most of his childhood, Adam Amram’s journey has carried him across the U.S., from Baltimore to Palo Alto, and most recently, New Haven, where he completed his MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale. His painting practice has evolved into an exploration of time, memory, shifting narratives, and ambiguous landscapes that use color to toe the line between the real and the surreal.
He uses a palette of acrylic single pigment concentrates to mix his own colors with precision, resulting in signature gradients of reds, greens, purples, and blues that create the appearance of dreamlike sunsets or moody twilights, and keep viewers on their toes. “I love that consciousness shift where the viewer has to think: Is this reality or not reality?” he says. 

Amram’s iterative approach is central to his exploration of memory. Written notes turn into numerous sketches, allowing ideas to develop through repetition. He draws a parallel to animation—a field he explored during his MFA—where repeated images generate narrative through subtle shifts. By the time an image he’s circling around reaches a canvas–such as an inside-out umbrella in Scarlet Billows (2024)–it has already traveled through layers of recollection and revision. Though it carries traces of its origin, the pieces stand apart as a new reality.

During his residency in Miami, Amram worked on paintings investigating the curious and comical image of cats stuck in trees—a childhood memory that presented itself as a metaphor for time. Cats often get stuck because they struggle to walk backwards, a quirk Amram says speaks to the impossibility of “turning back” in time. In his hands, the trees his cats scale become symbolic placeholders; surrealist presences devoid of specific identities but filled with imagined stories and hidden objects. 

Amram says Miami as a city stoked his interest in the absurd and poignant due to its tropical landscape dotted with development amidst out-of-place creatures like the ibis, wild roosters, and peacocks.