Katherina Olschbaur

Originally from Austria, painter Katherina Olschbaur is now a well-known figure on the Los Angeles art scene, where she arrived over 7 years ago. Her sensitivity, curiosity and commitment are striking, made of all the experiences from her childhood and studies in Vienna, her time in Dakar, and her encounter with the Los Angeles artistic commu- nity. Ahead of presenting her next solo show in Paris at Galerie Perrotin in September, Katherina talks about her work and creative process with honesty, always driven by her emotions, connecting the abstract with the narrative-driven and all the layers that she is composed of. Among other things, we talked about the cultural processes, religious imagery, tensions and bodies that provoke a quiet restlessness in her practice.

Among other historical archetypes, Katherina Olschbaur’s recent solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery, Live Flesh, took Greek mythology as a starting point, giving the show a traditional flare. That ancient Greek myths prevail as relevant cultural touchstones is confounding and yet somehow grounding. As Charlotte Higgins writes in Greek Myths: A New Retelling, these myths “remain true for us because they… deal, in short, in the hard, basic facts of the human condition.”

The paintings’ body flesh is alive with pulsing energy that oscillates between passion and violence, paradise and horror, sorrow and pain. Olschbaur’s figures are surrounded by shadowy, atmospheric expanses of dazzling colors; this creates a diffuse aura around figurative elements which dissolve into abstract backgrounds with subtle color gradations and tonalities.

Greater LA host Steve Chiotakis and arts reporter Lindsay Preston-Zappas discuss Katherina Olschbaur's vivid and gender-twisting take on mythology in her solo exhibition at Nicodim, Los Angeles: Live Flesh. 

"As a woman, you are always multiple personalities; you learn how to live in the world: to adapt, to define, to give, to take, and to demand." - Katherina Olschbaur

Olschbaur examines cultural myths—in both the historical and Roland Barthian sense—around gender and patriarchy amidst our current political chaos. Dealing with unconscious desire, she applies tactics of Surrealism, creating compositions that meld human bodies, objects, animals, and formal elements.

Within this resurgent Surrealism is work that explores body-object confusion, found within the works of Katherina Olschbaur and Robin Williams. This is a skin of replacement, that reflects its material surroundings back towards the space it inhabits, confusing the delineation of subject and object and the space it occupies.

Olschbaur and Unzicker, the latter, associate director and curator at UC Irvine, soon began working on the exhibition Dirty Elements, which would draw on themes from classical artworks, while transforming these pieces into what she calls “sensual spaces of erotic delight.” The exhibition, featuring eight large oils by the artist, opened in January at UC Irvine’s University Art Gallery, with several paintings deriving inspiration from mythology, religious and historical artworks.

Katherina Olschbaur, in an interview by PARNASS Kunstmagazin, discusses the inspiration for her recent series of paintings, her feelings about living in Los Angeles, and the influence of the political in her works. "I move around the edges. I create a narrative, and then I destroy it again," explains Olschbaur. She is currently for nominated for this year's Cardinal King Art Prize. 

The Austrian-born painter, now based in L.A., combines surreal aspects of horses, human figures and signifiers of femininity (think high-heeled shoes) — all of it a playing on tangled issues of both freedom and domination...

The horse, to Katherina Olschbaur, is a banner of freedom, but also one of constraint. Some of her subjects are galloping unbridled, powering through surreal, fluorescent landscapes as the ground bows, its surface giving willfully to the weight of each hoof....