Katherina Olschbaur
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Katherina Olschbaur: Live Flesh
Installation View
Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
Over the course of his life, Titian painted thirty-some versions of the lovelorn Venus’ failed seduction of Adonis, the young man's sights set on other game. Titian’s recursive portrayals extend a single tragedy into a Sisyphean courtship; Venus eternally outstretched and tumbling, Adonis forever recoiling in disgust. Their flailing embrace is fleeting and infinite. Live Flesh, Katherina Olschbaur’s third solo exhibition with Nicodim, permeates the circular mythology of Titian’s repeated compositions and furthers Venus’ tortured ecstasy into epic, unresolved narratives that stretch beyond.
The skin within Live Flesh pulsates with electric current. It throbs, it glistens, it crawls, it bleeds. It is alive. In “After Venus and Adonis (Live Flesh),” 2021, the subjects’ skin telegraphs the direction of motion: the hot-blooded seductress expels the cooler-toned Adonis into a menacing storm. Olschbaur’s heroine is more muscular and masculine than her predecessors—she is a vicious huntress—while her Adonis is an exceptionally femme and tender prey, his metallic, flopping dong more accessory than dagger. In “Picnic of Two Suns,” 2021, the neon orange fleshtones of a gender-fluid central figure reflect and radiate the light of twin stars onto a bareback bacchanal to illuminate, amongst other things, the swallower of a well-built sword (Adonis, take note), and a gaggle of purple-feathered geese pleasuring the supine Leda. Venus would feel much more welcome here. “Sub Red,” 2021, follows a fiery coven of witches, cherubs, or goddesses as they gleefully ride one of their own into submission, tugging at her wings, thrusting her earthbound. The airborne angels are flush with sex and desire, the defeated’s fire has been squelched, her skin is bilious and muted.
Live Flesh is a body of work centered on the body itself. It is a study of the equal and opposite forces that keep our skin and everything inside it in constant motion as we hurtle through space. Like Titian to Venus and Adonis, Olschbaur’s new paintings visit and revisit a central action and reaction, but the bodies themselves dictate the resulting drama. They are arguments against predetermination, a rainbow of possible and impossible outcomes.
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Katherina Olschbaur (b.1983, Bregenz, Lake Constance, Austria) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Olschbaur graduated from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. Recent exhibitions include Dominique Fung and Katherina Olschbaur: My Kingdom and a Horse, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, two-artist); Night Blessings, Union Pacific, London (2021, solo), Tortured Ecstasies, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2020, solo); Dirty Elements, Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA (2020, solo); Hollywood Babylon, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim, AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, CA (2020); The Divine Hermaphrodite, GNYP Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2019, solo); and Horses, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2018, solo). In 2021, she was selected for Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock residency in Dakar, Senegal.
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.
Live Flesh, Katherina Olschbaur’s third solo exhibition with Nicodim, permeates the circular mythology of Titian’s repeated compositions and furthers Venus’ tortured ecstasy into epic, unresolved narratives that stretch beyond. The skin within Live Flesh pulsates with electric current. It throbs, it glistens, it crawls, it bleeds.