Circular and unfolding movements repeat across these new canvases, as Olivia van Kuiken rails against stasis. Her investment in–and subsequent representation of–mobility is attached to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies and Giacomo Balla’s revelatory oil painting Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (“Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”), which was accomplished in 1912. The latter’s focus on repetition and form is especially relevant, as it reflects the dynamic sensationism articulated by a group led by Umberto Boccioni (and including Balla) in the 1910 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting.” The collective proclaims, “on account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.” In van Kuiken’s Multiply, for instance, one can sense Futurist conceptions of momentum laid bare and reconfigured for the twenty-first century.
According to van Kuiken, these aren’t specific people with subjectivities (per Alice Neel or Lucian Freud), but truly emptied-out bodies. She draws from figure reference books, then totally wings it in terms of new structural configurations. The resulting forms are manipulated and foreshortened, subtly Frankensteined together through shuffling and collaging. Extremities are multiplied: four arms here, an extra leg there. One such example, titled Splayed legs, disrupts neat figuration accordingly while also subtly referring to Frank Stella’s hard-edge painting.
Futurism and Geometric Abstraction are just a few sources from which van Kuiken pulls energetic and formal qualities. Baroque emerges as another core muse underpinning the artist’s latest body of work. Here, the movement characterized by drama and excess is reframed within a contemporary landscape. In the current epoch of hyperinformation and impossible narrative strings, there exists no universality nor a stable meaning-making apparatus. Van Kuiken also cites the nature of opacity as one that drives her own imaginal investments. She also expresses a confrontational attitude toward her pool of citations. By referring at once to the thing, and then engaging its opposite, one participates in the arena of dialectics, from which systems like language are born. A maelstrom of impressions thus collapses into the same sphere of investigation, leaving van Kuiken to navigate conflicting methods. When pathworked together, however, these networks bounce between each other, hurdling forward and gaining momentum.
Previous references to Japanese landscape gave way to meditations on a positional relationship between viewer and free-standing painting. The resulting work is less imagistic and more experiential; Van Kuiken places a particular onus on the viewer-in-space, referring back to the tenets of minimalism and nonobjectivism. Further yet, eight paintings are staged upright, spreading out across the gallery floor. This situationalization communicates a felt presence beyond the image alone, offering architectural and bodily aspects simultaneously. On the reverse sides of these maximalist figures, one meets a suite of monochromes that comprise an alternative colorfield exhibition.
The exhibition’s title, “Bastard Rhyme,” is related to a slant rhyme, which is built from similar but not exact sounds (for example: kind/time or tame/rain). This bolsters van Kuiken’s appraisal of linguistic flexibility, speaking directly to the infighting and thwarting of expectations in terms of painterly signification. The phrase is also present in all caps on a particular composition, whose central figure dons the word “BASTARD” like a halo or crown around the head. At the painting’s lower edge, “RHYME” is scrawled in the same font, though rendered in light pink. Shadows and glitches punctuate the scene, swarming the central head with dimensionality. In keeping with the rest of the works on view, van Kuiken effectively cites then distorts the conventions of formalism in a move against painterly logic.
-Reilly Davidson
Olivia van Kuiken (b. 1997 in Chicago, Illinois) is a New York based artist. She received a BFA, Studio Art, Cooper Union, New York.
Solo Exhibitions include Losing looking leaving, Caprii, Düsseldorf (2024); Beil Lieb, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); Make me Mulch!, Chapter NY, New York (2023); She clock, me clock, we clock, King’s Leap, New York (2022).
Select group exhibitions include What are you looking for?, curated by Brandy Carstens, Société, Berlin (2025); the Lord will spit out the lukewarm, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2025); Meet me by the lake, CLEARING, New York (2024); Mad Monk, Micki Meng, New York (2024); A Modern Disease, curated by Cooper Brovenick, New York (2024); Manic Pixie Nightmare Drawings, Adler Beatty, New York (2024); Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York (2023); Works on Paper: 100 Years, Amanita, New York (2023); Supper Club, As it Stands, Los Angeles (2023); Oceans of Time, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2022); Elective Affinities, Chapter NY, New York (2022); Bright lights, big city, no fun, Shoot the Lobster, New York (2022); La Saison Creuse, Hoffman Maler Wallenburg, Nice (2022).