Artist Bio

Vildan Starr is a visual artist based in Westchester, New York, and a practicing attorney in New York City. A painter since childhood, she has worked across realistic landscapes, still life, figurative, and abstract modes. Since 2020, her practice has centered on intuitive abstraction, creating paintings built through spontaneous mark-making, layered color, and an ongoing negotiation between intuition and structure.

Starr works without a predetermined plan. Each painting begins with loose, physical gestures, drawing freely, responding to whatever energy is present, before entering a period of tension where layers accumulate and the work resists resolution. Through editing, restructuring, and response, order gradually emerges from chaos. Spontaneous gestures are disrupted by structure, and structure is loosened again by intuition. The finished composition is not planned but found, a moment where disparate elements come into alignment.

Her visual language draws from nature. Forms suggesting water, terrain, paths, and organic growth surface throughout her work, but these are not depictions of actual places. They are inner landscapes, shaped by memory, emotion, and lived experience rather than observation. Working primarily in acrylic, Starr builds complexity with water-soluble pastels, charcoal, graphite, acrylic ink, and markers.

Her work has been selected for juried exhibitions by curatorial professionals from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. She has exhibited widely throughout the New York and Connecticut region, including solo exhibitions in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Her training includes extensive coursework over more than three decades, including studies at Otis College of Art and Design, Nicholas Wilton’s Creative Visionary Program, abstract painting critiques with Anna Patalano (MFA, Yale University School of Art) at the Greenwich Art Society, and art classes taken in Perugia, Italy during college. Starr is currently in Frank O’Cain’s painting program at The Art Students League of New York.