Katherina Olschbaur

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.”

Regardless if nude, topless, or dressed, portrayed in a passionate embrace of a lover, accompanied by an animal, or holding a child, Olschbaur's gender-fluid muses are depicted with an almost mythical amount of confidence, determination,and effortlessness. Dominated by such centrally positioned figures, these monumental scenes and compositions seem to be shedding new lights, both figuratively and literally, on the familiar mythological or pseudo-historical scenes.

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

"There is often a dark underlying tone in my work, but I seek to transform this darkness into pleasure. I am interested in concepts of devotion, submission, adoration and worship in a broader sense, but also in human relationships. How can ecstasy, desire, piousness and sadistic or submissive impulses be translated into a visual experience?" – 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.

Katherina Olschbaur’s painted figures exist in a state of constant flux. Refusing to settle in a singular, fixed body, they flit between sexes, gender presentations, human, animal and pre-human forms. In her recent exhibitions, ‘The Divine Hermaphrodite’ and ‘Horses’, the haunches of bulls and horses become human feet fitted into too-small, cloven heels; voluptuous, horned beasts pose in thigh-high fetish boots; muscular thighs and calves bend and stretch, attached to broad-shouldered, breasted torsos and equine heads. Human dominates animal and animal dominates human in an erotic performance of evolutionary metamorphosis.

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. 

"When form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling”
—Chris Kraus, I Love Dick