Salon Highlight: Olivia Guterson

Exhibitions

Salon Highlight:
Olivia Guterson
July 9 - August 24, 2022

Featured Artwork

Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present our latest Salon Highlight with Detroit-based multi-disciplinary artist Olivia Guterson. Primarily through black ink, her compositions are deeply personal investigations of truth influenced by geometric abstraction, remembrance, ancestral patterns, and their relation to the natural world. The intricate layerings in her work reveal her inner knowings that exist beyond written language.

Guterson’s interest in pattern as language stems from her multiracial heritage, which inspires how the patterns relate to one another and stand alone. Her mother African American and her father Ukrainian Russian Jewish, Guterson never found herself feeling confused about her identity, like “half of a whole” as she describes it, despite the contrasts in culture embedded in her heritage; she has always been aware and sure of the space she holds in the world. This strong sense of self bleeds into Guterson’s artwork. The incongraphies and geometric abstractions that make up the constellation of works for the Salon Highlight are informed by mementos or memories Guterson recalls, such as fabrics her grandmother sewed and quilted and that great grandmother would wear, or the spices her grandmother on her mom’s side would use to cook with growing up. Distilling these influences to simple, digestible shapes forges endless and harmonious patterns that tell a very specific story, yet offer space for anyone to connect.

Demonstrated in the featured paintings, Guterson has recently begun to incorporate a grid-like system, energetic channels as she refers to them, to guide her compositions; with this, the artist is challenged to navigate a series of set boundaries in a way that enhances conversations between differing patterns rather than posing as a distraction. Guterson’s practice is, above all, a study of her stream of consciousness and an outlet to record her most honest thoughts and experiences. The paintings, which are characterized by a seamless blend of fragmented patterns, symbolize the complex minds of humans and the endless myriad of ideas that are inherently intertwined within.

The collage-like effect that the grid technique yields also aids in achieving Guterson’s goal of dimensionality within her paintings. Sticking to strict use of black and white, it is important to Guterson that the positive and negative spaces presented emit equalized energies and work together as one, rather than existing independently, appearing as if one color rests upon the other. Likening her series of paintings to a journal, the black and white pigments are reminiscent of pen on paper or traditional typed text, effectively furthering the establishment of her visual language.

Salon Highlight: Olivia Guterson will be on view from July 9 through August 24, 2022

Featured Artwork

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