NYAB Event - Nana Olivas “Pieces”

Nana Olivas “Pieces”

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

This event has ended.

In the sway between chaos and calm, Nana Olivas feels comfortably settled in the unknown. She embraces a creative process that is intensely physical, and often unpredictable. In her work, the exchange between mediums - gesso, varnish, wood, and muslin - becomes a dance of chance, choice, and change.

Pieces, an exhibition of her recent mixed media paintings, explores these encounters and reactions, and revels in a display of surfaces that have reached visceral pitch.

Olivas’ work is viscous and heavy, but hardly inert. Foreground and background are conceived by building up elements with a notably corporeal register. Islands of color seem to migrate fluidly, with plasma-like peculiarity. Flush hues spill over, exploring the limits of a painting’s traditional parameters. A transparent layer of muslin, exposed stretcher bars; these elements act to illuminate that which is present, and prefers to be hidden, or that which exists and begs for attention.

Her paintings also reveal the tension and give that comes with the process of growth. They are creatures of both endogenous and exogenous change; transformation wrestles beneath the surface, as much as it is a product of Olivas’ own definitive actions. Using non-traditional tools, laminated prayer cards and pastry knives, she drags, drips, pushes. On the heavily worked surface, gesso flows and pools, varnish cracks, chips, wood warps. Forms are constantly re-formed, and just beneath one vacillating layer, there is another. Ultimately, what is seen is what has endured, and, unrelenting, she goes on.
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Nana Olivas lives and works in NYC. She has studied at Parsons school of design, The School of Visual Arts, The Art Students league, and the AIM, program at the Bronx Museum. Nana Olivas’s work has been exhibited at, ABC NO RIO in exile, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, Woodstock Byrdcliff Guild, A.I.R. Gallery, Christine Rose Gallery, PS 122, The Snug Harbor Cultural Center NY, Rockford Museum of Art IL, The Hofstra Museum NY, Nuyouricans poets café, The Vibrant Gallery, and the Bronx Museum.