T. L. Solien (b. 1949) is a current professor of painting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been shown in New York City, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Chicago, including group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Museum, and the Walker Art Center, respectively. According to the artist’s statement: “T.L. Solien's art concerns ‘relationships between symbolic presentations of the Self and the existential framework in which the Self operates.’ His study of the history of abstraction and figural narrative has led him to invent a personal, idiosyncratic visual language. The resulting ‘self portraits’ are influenced by figure painting relationships, popular illustration and vintage animation. Solien seeks to ‘explore the conditions in which Identity is anchored in uncertainty, swept along a raging river of consciousness, comprised of Historicism and Fiction, Hope and Fear, Memory and Desire, Evolution and Decay.”