OLIVIA VAN KUIKEN Beil Lieb

Château Shatto is delighted to announce Beil Lieb, a solo exhibition of new works by Olivia van Kuiken and her first with the gallery. The exhibition will open Saturday, February 24, 2024 and will remain on view through April 6, 2024.

Olivia van Kuiken’s (b. 1997, Chicago, IL) paintings and drawings dramatize the invigorating, yet attenuating, exchanges between thought, material and image. Her work sutures referential material within expressively fashioned fields, in turn invoking abstraction’s supplication to language and other semiotic systems.

The new paintings and drawings that comprise Beil Lieb establish their own system of reference, while feasting upon broader visual networks. The paintings’ productive attitude, along with their state of porosity, asserts the medium of painting as a field purportedly characterized by an interior and exterior––an axiom assumed by conceptions around the body and its barrier against surrounding space. van Kuiken’s paintings do away with this dyad and position the illusory as a physical condition, as much as a perspectival one. Amidst these convulsions between states, van Kuiken keeps the aesthetic opportunity of paint’s liquidity and pliability alive in each mark.

Beil Lieb finds a syntactical companion in Unica Zürn’s 1968 novel The Trumpets of Jericho. Sharing in the spirit of Zürn’s post-Dadaisms, van Kuiken assembles the painted field to lend coherence to discordant corporeal and cognitive phenomena. The anxiety and exuberance inherent in language is given shape in van Kuiken’s work through the building up and undoing of forms, with equal vehemence applied to the construction and dissolution of what occupies the surface of her paintings. Zürn’s imagined tower––the setting for the novel’s psychedelic capturing of natal delivery––finds a companion in the bounded architecture of van Kuiken’s paintings. As in Zürn’s novel, van Kuiken’s paintings put an ecstatic pressure on the boundary that contains them, observing this threshold as an indelible condition of their being and the constrictive warden that contains what would otherwise spill over––or what is otherwise open-ended.