Tag: Olympia

Solo Shows

Pol Morton’s invitation to empathize

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I often want to touch paintings when I go to galleries, but I rarely do. I know I can get away with it, but it doesn’t usually seem worth the risk. What new phenomena could I possibly discover after years of making art? It’s a depressing thought, but one I’m mercifully relieved of when I see a Pol Morton piece. “Get Well,” their solo show at Olympia, is a trove of stuff you want to lay hands on and dig through. I could write a novel going through all the materials. In the interest of brevity, I’ll stick to how it feels to look. 

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Solo Shows

Hung Liu’s timeless twentieth century

Contributed by Rosetta Marantz Cohen / Rare among contemporary artists, Hung Liu, who died in 2021, chronicled the trauma experienced by the Chinese diaspora in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Her paintings, currently on view at Ryan Lee, vividly depict a female artist’s efforts to reconcile the terror of China’s recent past and the “otherness” she experienced after her emigration to the United States. The exhibit seems especially poignant now as questions about homeland, memory, and trauma resonate with such immediacy. 

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Solo Shows

Lee Maxey: Teasing out the uneasy

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Many years ago, I saw a strange and seductive specter on a cold winter night in Troy, New York, that has haunted me to this day. Through the glass windows of a gloomily defunct department store, a neon shock of orange letters hovered in the air spelling out the word EXIST. This enigma was the work of the artist Sharon Bates, part of an installation in which she cleverly riffed on the authority of an EXIT sign, transforming an everyday sight into a glowing spiritual command. I was reminded of Bates’s sculpture while taking in Lee Maxey’s new exhibition of paintings, titled “Wait Here,” at Olympia.

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Solo Shows

Dana Frankfort: Braiding the senses

Contributed by Matt Phillips / Dana Frankfort’s exhibition “Life and Death” at Olympia presents eleven paintings that are by turns blunt and strikingly sensitive.These new works juxtapose the written word with gestural abstraction, the two languages simultaneously contradicting and supporting one another. Some paintings have legible text while in others the letters are all but gone, leaving the viewer to contemplate space where words have once been. The works are disparate, but each reaches toward a cohesive resolution.

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Solo Shows

Mie Yim: Hazardous and barely fictional

Contributed by Clare Gemima / Painter Mie Yim evidently can’t quite understand how exciting she is. “Oh, and by the way,” she said as I had one foot out of her Bronx studio, “one of the paintings in the show will be installed in front of a huge mural.” She seemed convinced of the dubiousness of this idea even though she had landed two solo exhibitions and was preparing for both at once. I thought she would elaborate, but her sentence stopped there. Over the course of our conversation, Yim’s high-energy teasing had me waiting like an excited toddler for “Belladonna” at Olympia – in coordination with “Nightshade” at Simone Subal Gallery – to open.

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Solo Shows

Alyssa Klauer’s queer phantasmagoria

Contributed by Patrick Neal / Is the detectable hand of the artist evidence of a unique creator, or is gesture mainly indicative of earlier painters touches, the ghosts of art history? More broadly, do we choose the course of our own lives or are they predestined? These thoughts about individual sensibility and personal agency occurred to me while viewing Alyssa Klauers fine, visually and intellectually energized solo show Dare Me, on view at Olympia on the Lower East Side.

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