NYAB Event - Olive Ayhens “Interior Wilderness”

Olive Ayhens “Interior Wilderness”

Lori Bookstein Fine Art

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This exhibition will feature recent paintings of urban, ecological and interior landscapes including Brittany, rural Wyoming and Grand Central Station to name a few. While inspired by the artist’s many residencies and fellowships at each of these places, Ayhens often transforms them into fantastical landscapes all their own. Frequently, industrial architecture, commercial design and natural flora and fauna co-exist in a single dream-like composition made all the more eccentric by a palette of super-saturated colors and undulating planes of space. Indeed, multiple focal points offer smaller, simultaneous plots to her otherwise unruly, neo-expressionist tableaux.

The artist explains that in her work “the boundaries between inside and outside spaces become blurred with images intruding into and overlapping one another.” This is certainly the case in the painting, Interior Wilderness, in which crystal chandeliers and a coiffured ceiling amalgamate into an industrial warehouse with fluorescent lighting. Meanwhile, below, what looks to be a shopping mall water feature overflows its tiled pool, filling the space with water, trees, shrubbery and a surfeit of frogs. It is a scene in which the man-made world has collided with the natural world, creating a composition that is at once both wistful and nightmarish.

Olive Ayhens (b. Oakland, CA) received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to her extensive exhibition history, Ayhens has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Joan Mitchell Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant. Artist residencies include The Walsh Sharp Art Foundation Space Program, MacDowell Colony, Fundacion Valparaiso, the Salzburg Kunsterhaus, Yaddo Artist Residency, Djerassi Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and most recently the Roswell Artist in Residency. The artist lives and works in New York City.