Steven Harvey is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings from 2020-2024 by Lauren Olitski. LAUREN OLITSKI is a painter, sculptor, and writer, living and working in Southern Vermont. She is known for her vigorous, often thickly impastoed, large-scale abstract paintings. Lauren has had numerous exhibitions in the US and Canada, including fifteen solo exhibitions. The works in this exhibition, often easel scaled, display a joyful, gorgeous lyricism and material inventiveness, seemingly linked to her poetry.
As a student at the University of New Hampshire, she studied with the poet Charles Simic and the writer Russell Banks, and then poets Thomas Lux, Jane Cooper, Jean Valentine, and Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College. She attended the Masters Program in Writing at City College in New York City, studying with the poet, William Mathews, and writers, Mark Mirsky and Elizabeth Hardwick, and is a recipient of the Goodman Fellowship for Poetry.
Lauren continued to write throughout her career while moving her primary focus to painting. Her work is influenced by having grown up surrounded by art of the color field painters and postwar abstract expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s; her father, Jules Olitski, as well as Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Milton Avery, Hans Hofmann, David Smith. Early on, she came in contact with many of these artists, as well as the art critics, Clement Greenberg, Michael Freed, and Jack Flam. Initially, she shied away from pure abstraction, working from the figure and landscape. Eventually, she created a series of purely abstract paintings and discovered a natural ease with the format. More recently, she has added three-dimensional work, in ceramic and steel, to her repertoire.
Drawn to the art of El Greco, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, Lauren’s work is informed by the use of structure, edge, and light she observes in the masters. Paul Cézanne said, “…one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.” Through the use of modern day materials—acrylic paints and mediums that allow for a variety of surfaces, and interference and iridescent pigments, often incorporating fabric and other collage elements in her paintings, she extends the pictorial space and color architecture of her work and carries on a sophisticated conversation with great painting of the past, and with her viewers.
“Through the use of modern day materials—acrylic paints and mediums that allow for a variety of surfaces, and interference and iridescent pigments, often incorporating fabric and other collage elements in her paintings, as well as her investigation of color, surface and shape.”
For further information and images, please contact the gallery:
Info@shfap.com 917-861-7312
Thank you!
