OSIRIS RAIN
INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED MURALIST AND PUBLIC ARTIST
Osiris Rain is an internationally recognized muralist and public artist based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Working at architectural scale, his murals combine classical realism, layered abstraction, and symbolic geometry to explore history, identity, memory, and the relationship between people and the places they inhabit.
Rain’s foundation is in traditional figurative painting. He studied at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence, Italy, and later apprenticed with Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. That classical training remains at the center of his work, but over two decades his practice has expanded beyond the studio and onto buildings, public spaces, and city walls across the United States and internationally.
His public work begins with place. Historical research, conversations with residents, archival imagery, landscape, architecture, and lived experience become source material from which each composition develops. Rather than imposing a predetermined visual language onto a community, Rain looks for the people, stories, contradictions, and symbols already embedded there.
The resulting murals move between recognizable figures and abstraction. Portraits emerge from fields of color, geometry, pattern, landscape, and fragmented imagery—allowing a work to function both as an immediate visual experience and as something that reveals itself more slowly over time.
Rain is the founder of the North Carolina Academy of Art and a co-founder of the TAOH Outdoor Gallery and Can Jam CLT Mural Festival. His work has received national and international recognition through awards, exhibitions, collections, and publications.
For Rain, public art is not simply the placement of an image on a wall. It is an opportunity to make something inseparable from its location—work that could not have been made in quite the same way anywhere else.
SELECTED RECOGNITION
National Mural Awards
National Silver Award — Hitchhikers, 2026
Regional Gold Award — Hitchhikers, 2026
National Bronze Award — From It Sprung the Commonwealth, 2024
Charlotte URBIES
People’s Choice Award — TAOH Outdoor Gallery, 2024
Best in the Nest
TAOH Outdoor Gallery, 2024
Selected Exhibitions & Collections
MEAM — European Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, Spain
National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Selected Press
Fine Art Connoisseur
Southwest Art
Juxtapoz
The Huffington Post
Queen City Nerve
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
My work begins with observation.
I am interested in the things people carry with them: memory, history, labor, mythology, grief, aspiration, and our relationship with the natural world. I use the human figure as an anchor for those ideas, combining realism with abstraction, geometry, pattern, and imagery drawn from the particular place where the work is being made.
My training is rooted in classical painting, and I still approach a face, a hand, or a figure with the same concern for structure, light, and human presence that brought me to painting in the first place. But I am equally interested in what happens when that representation begins to break apart—when an image becomes atmosphere, pattern, memory, or symbol.
Public work adds another layer. I enter communities whose histories are not mine, and I take that responsibility seriously. Research and listening are part of the process. I look for the details that carry meaning locally: a person, an object, a landscape, a piece of architecture, a story that survived because somebody kept telling it.
I am not interested in illustrating history as a collection of facts. I am interested in finding the human thread running through it.
The scale of muralism allows those ideas to become physical. A face can occupy several stories. A small historical object can become monumental. Abstraction can move across architecture and change how a building is experienced from a block away or from a few feet in front of it.
The goal is to make work that rewards both distances—something powerful enough to alter a place, but layered enough that a person who lives with it can continue finding something in it years later.
— Osiris Rain