NYAB Event - Jeff Olsson "A Fair Deal"

Jeff Olsson "A Fair Deal"

Jack Hanley

This event has ended.

Jack Hanley Gallery presents a new body of large-scale drawings by Jeff Olsson. This exhibition will mark the artist’s first solo show in the United States and with the gallery.

Olsson’s drawings in graphite and charcoal seduce the viewer into the remote wilderness. Figures are rendered with delicate graphite lines and powdery white highlights, going about mundane tasks bathed in an ethereal glow. The highly-detailed and lightly rendered foreground opens into a dark background bringing together an endless sea of mountains and cloudy skies, suggesting nothing but forest for the imaginable distance. Olsson’s technique employs a subtle shift from figurative drawing to the expressionistic curvature of a Benton landscape, offering the viewer a dynamic range of whites, greys and blacks.

Compositions are focused around a single figure or group of people. A clearing in the forest stages the scene. The sepia undertones of the paper suggest a bygone era while the character’s dress and at times, technology, suggest a contemporary society made up of people who have turned their backs on mainstream experiences and vanished into the wild. Somewhere between folk-tale and fantasy the figures, who are generally apathetic to the happening if engaged at all, congregate around an inexplicable or vague, and potentially cult-like event. After careful inspection something disconcerting typically presents itself; whether it be the contrast of discordant visual cues or the ghostly rendering of figures, the scenes blend real and surreal events as though they represent freeze-framed microcosms from a lucid dream.

Jeff Olsson was born 1981 in Kristinehamn, Sweden. He currently works in Gothenburg. Educated at Gerlesborgskolan (2001–2003) and the MFA Valand School of fine arts (2003–2008). Selected solo exhibitions: Jack Hanley, New York (2013), Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm (2010, 2011), Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg (2009) and Galleri Big Love, Gothenburg (2005). Selected group exhibitions: Needles and Pens, San Francisco (2010), Liljevalchs vårsalong, Stockholm (2009), Göteborgs konsthall, Gothenburg (2008), Bonniers konsthall, Stockholm (2008), and Olssons work has been on groupdisplays’ at The Armory Show, New York (2011, 2012) and Art Copenhagen (2007).