Perrotin is pleased to present Katherina Olschbaur’s first major European presentation in France, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.
Text by Mara Hassan
SWEET EXPULSION.
A purging that gives the body more than it loses.
With every marking upon surface, Katherina Olschbaur relinquishes herself increasingly by the stroke to a plane beyond the here and now. A place beyond our pining. Drawing from intimate mythologies, early abstract expressionist tactics, and the autobiographical, her paintings deliver themselves, and us, from our very moment. They are braided scenes of dreams and memories caught in the crossfires of figuration, equally explosive and meditative, equally familiar and foreign. Olschbaur’s visual language is unique in its treatment of color, form, and subject; recurring are deconstructed bodies and sites, clashing seas of gradating hues, and gestural lashes of bright pigments.
Color, in this recent body of work, is investigated with a new sensitive restraint. Olschbaur recenters color not as a means to an end, but as a primary element of integrity in and of itself. Inspired by the philosophies of colorfield painting, new experiments on the monochrome have yielded harmonious results that reconsider the character of pigmented space.
Just allowing one color some time, some time, and they’ve unfurled. The affordances of each hue fleshed out meticulously by Olschbaur, her meditative swaths of paint submerge sight into feeling. Indigos, wines, metallic glints. Space, time, and matter collapse by way of her compositions — they are arrangements that guide us towards our own surrender in the name of something bigger, something truer. But what does one yield themself to? What is that bigger truth? What is more real than the empirical? And how does feeling eclipse seeing?
Eclipse images that expanse of possibility with a burning tenderness. Centrifugally, a brilliance radiates outward — towards us — washing everything in a warm glow of incandescent siennas and thick, heavy browns. Here, scenes of people, places, and animals are suspended, motionless, in swaths of color — impressions. Bleeding into one another, no memory is severed from another. Instead, a tapestry of life is woven. Two silhouetted profiles lean into each other, a bird soars, a woman in repose rests her weary head, a party girl is walking off. Captured by Olschbaur is the twilight of love, lust, and pleasure, a liminal fissure between the rhythm of life and the amnestic state of sleep. A fissure that destroys reason in the name of everything feeling right again.
I’m reminded of Edward Steichen’s 1901 quote: “What a beautiful hour of the day is that of the twilight when things disappear and seem to melt into each other, and this great feeling of peace overshadows all.” Eclipse captures Steichen's peace — the serenity of a lover’s caress, the reverberation of a subwoofer's bass, a kiss from a stranger on ketamine, a mother duck’s guidance. The truth of it all is that which exceeds language and is instead tasted in the droplets of a night’s impenetrable sweat.
Another painting, Expulsion, a diptych displayed in the second room, sees its main animating figure as a polycephalic angel whose left hand reaches out towards a beyond — a future. Her hair, like her wings and draping skirt, billows by the running of wind against her body. Her skin — multifarious in color, texture, and form — is dynamic and vibrant in its kaleidoscopic refraction of light and shape. In the future, that beyond, bodies in love and respite are sprawled across mercurial lakes of heat and cool aurorae; effaced yet all the more human, every square inch of their forms unfold sunsets anew. Here, Olschbaur cites the Roman god Janus, made identifiable by the angel’s two heads. The god of beginnings and ends, Janus overlooks transitions, change, liminality, duality, passages, and doorways. One head always looks forward, the other always behind. The formalism of time is thrusted into insecurity, a recurring motif throughout this new body of work. Constellations of vignettes reorganize time and memories, thus bringing one to contend with the past and future of speculative fiction. Expulsion’s primary lesson is rooted in its structuring of time, bodies, and places — it strives to teach us that just beyond ourselves, on the surface of the day’s skin, the potential for a new paradise is always latent.
As eyes dance along the canvases of Olschbaur’s paintings, one is reminded of what it feels like to exist within historical time, perpetually fumbling at the edge of reason. I am just as confused as I am always meant to be — though, it all makes much more sense that way. Brought to mind is the lesson that history, the story of it all, exceeds our grasp by its great recalcitrant nature; it is child-like, as it squirms from our cold embrace right when we believe we’ve come to pacify it.
To make sense of the splintering effects of phenomena in our lives is a task of looking beyond modernity itself, of receding from the sterilizing project of morality and order. Yes — the stars that swirl around our crowns are also those that guide us North. Our hubris would have us believe that time organizes itself in line within our own limits, that history’s own body can only catch the fruit of yesterday’s promise. But no, for Olschbaur’s paintings remind us that just as we are subjects of history’s calculating production, we are also bound to its immense disorder — its cosmic unrest.
Born in 1983 in Bregenz, Lake Constance, Austria
Lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City, USA
Based between New York and Los Angeles, Katherina Olschbaur (born 1983) trained in painting, animation film and stage design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Her work has been the subject of solo institutional exhibitions Dirty Elements (2020) at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery of Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, USA, and Sirens (2023) at DANGXIA Art Space in Beijing, China.
The Austrian-born artist was emboldened by her move to Los Angeles in 2017 to push the boundaries in exploring the tenuous relationship between representation and abstraction, creating the distinct viewpoints on light, color and form for which her painting practice is recognized. Her work draws on references from culture and art history to her own experiences and surroundings, reflecting on personal memories and the relationship between the collective and individual unconscious which she observes through daily life.
More about the artist
