Shanti Escalante-De Mattei reviews Katherina Olschbaur’s “I Spend All Day Waiting for the Night” at Perrotin Gallery, New York.
Photographer : Guillaume Ziccarelli, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
The inside is like the outside, and the outside is like the inside. These inversions seem central to understanding Katherina Olschbaur’s work. When I visited her studio in Ridgewood the paintings that populate her show “I Spend All Day Waiting for the Night,” on view at Perrotin through December 20th, were still leaning against the walls, waiting for their final touches. The space is large, cold, and white. There was a pile of books in the middle of the room and birds all over the canvases. Olschbaur looks a bit like a bird herself. When we met she made a little nest for us by pushing some couches around, making a table out of crate and a glass palette, and offering me something to drink: “Water, seltzer, coffee…mezcal?” She turned down the music, cutting off the high tones of a woman’s voice. I ask her why all the birds? She tells me one day she looked out of the window and she saw a bird fall and die. Olschbaur painted three birds in the corner of what would become Triptych to help her begin the painting.
Photographer : Guillaume Ziccarelli, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Olschbaur’s paintings are populated with objects that seem to stand alone – birds, people, suns, moons, explosions – even when clustered together. It’s this quality that perhaps makes these icons feel symbolic, but Olschbaur insists that there is nothing to decode. Rather, she sees them as systems of focus in a fragmented narrative. Being described as “surrealist” frustrates her, referencing not just her paintings but the tendency to call the current state of the world “surreal.” “It’s just the only word we have for this in-between state we seem to be living in,” she said.
A word that Olschbaur does like is “world-building.” I offer her “chronotope.” It’s a term from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin that he used to describe the time (chrono)-space (tope) unit that are interconnected and represented in novels. These timescapes define genres, tropes, the kinds of characters that populate these landscapes and the pacing of a work. Olschbaur’s work so perfectly represents the chronotope in the sense that they seem to model a kind of interior landscape. Somewhere deep in the mind we hold a picture of the world. These paintings are Olschbaur’s pictures.
Photographer : Guillaume Ziccarell, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
In Diptych (The Piano Player), giants frame a frozen lake. In the light cast by one of these giants, shadows of people emerge, another giant holds a phone, in the corner, a small piano player faces a glacier. There is an explosion, there is a fire, someone is being trampled, but the cold stillness of ice and the white light of the moon cast their influence, cooling what could have been a picture of hot terror. Kinds of light rule the atmosphere of a painting: Triptych is defined by the long, drenching rays of a setting sun while I Spend All Day Waiting for the Night (Strobes) worships the neons, the glow of a phone. These worlds are chaotic, but also somewhat mythical. Olschbaur explains it like this,
“I use distorted spatial logics to create fragmented narratives and to illustrate power relations,” said Olschbaur. “But not in the sense of good and evil.”
It’s this refusal to put things into a moral valence that gives her paintings a timeless, almost mythical quality. The giant figures who live in these landscapes exist at such a different scale of being that we cannot access their motivations.
Photographer : Guillaume Ziccarelli, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
While these figures are so powerful in her work, it took Olschbaur a long time to accept the place of figuration in her work. Educated in Vienna, which Olschbaur described as being very driven by conceptual frameworks, figuration was looked down upon at the time. Though initially trained as a set designer, Olschbaur pivoted to painting and devoted herself to abstraction. It took leaving behind Vienna and its cerebral culture, along with a certain phase of her youth, to approach figuration.
“I learned to push that through that feeling of – is this good or bad?” said Olschbaur, who found herself attracted to the primacy and lack of control that came with allowing herself to be moved to paint a figure, an object, a landscape. What follows from that process is the expression of the unconscious. The inside is on the outside.
