Artist Profile 015: Tony Sobota

Tony Sobota is a Nashville based painter obsessed with color, movement, and structure.  Since 2016 he has closely followed Nashville’s frantically changing real estate landscape, forming his interests into an ongoing series of observational studies and architectural abstractions.  He has since oriented his process around abstract color grids.
Mostly self-taught, his popular Art of Construction series won him first place at the Nashville Arts and Business Council’s Periscope Pitch 2017.  He has been awarded several grants for public art projects in the Nashville area such as his 2019 “Little Kurdistan Community Mural”, featured on NPR.  Since 2010 he has exhibited at multiple gallery shows in the region, including being selected to Artfields 2021 and winning Best in Show at Nashville’s prestigious American Artisan Festival.  His collections include Metro Nashville, Graduate Hotels, Chartwell Hospitality, and the Nashville Soccer Club.  

Longing for simplicity I’ve distilled my process down to its essential building blocks.  Layering custom-mixed acrylic hues in a grid pattern I’m endlessly curious about how colors get along, or don’t.  More often they don’t—at least at first.  Built up over the course of a painting these individual hues learn to live together.  Certain color relationships become gathering places for beauty, while surface textures conspicuously conceal the painting’s history underneath.  Compositions may depart from the grid or reference specific subject matter, but these color relationships remain the primary organizing element of my painting.  Most of the time any figurative references that may have inspired a painting dissolve into a simple color portrait.

tonysobota.com