ABOUT THE ARTIST

“A painting should grab you by the throat, and not let you go.”

Advay Mengle (b. 1989, Los Angeles) is a self-taught American painter, photographer, and printmaker based in the San Francisco Bay. Advay works in bursts of bold, vibrant color with flat fields, thick, marbled, palette knife impasto, and feathered, flowing forms. His style spans from expressionist figuration to pure abstraction. Years of street, landscape, and wildlife photography and quantum physics inspire many of his compositions. In 2025, his first year of exhibiting, Advay has been curated into over 16 juried exhibitions worldwide, with works on view across the Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, and Sacramento areas, along with Spain, UK, France, and Japan.

Outside of the arts, Advay is an engineer, technology executive, and entrepreneur, currently serving as founder and CEO of a tech startup, previously at Google, Microsoft, and VP Engineering for a robotics AI company. Advay is an inventor of over 25 granted patents in software architecture, artificial intelligence, digital commerce, and advertising.

Contact Advay to purchase original paintings, prints, or license imagery.

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Artist Advay Mengle and his painting Antipasto I, On Exhibition at Art Works Downtown

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

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2025

2024

ADVAY’S WORKS ON THE WEB

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ARTIST STATEMENT

A painting should grab you by the throat, and not let you go - whether through intensity of feeling or by demanding quiet contemplation, and that is my goal in every piece I create.

I paint a broad range of works - expressionist figuration, hard-edge geometries, and lyrical, flowing forms.  My practice isn't limited to any particular style, and I prefer constantly experimenting, synthesizing ideas across stylistic boundaries.  The pieces that give me the most satisfaction are generally birthed spontaneously, as I paint the first layer, but then slowly refined into a final picture.  I photographically document the various states and layers in each work in my Ephemera series, to better understand and critique my own experiments.

I choose the subject matter of each work based on the feelings I wish to impart to the viewer.  My hard-edge abstracts communicate excitement and energy.  Figures are for joy or horror and dread.  Painterly abstraction - fuzz, gradients, granulation, and feathering - create calm and serenity.

One strand that cuts across my work is narrative construction through multi-panel installations.  Most of my current work is done in triptych or larger polyptych form, and I often assemble - and reassemble - the multi-panel installation to tell a new story from existing individual works, changing the narrative with each reassembly.

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