Exhibtion:
Erosion
Olivia Petrides Solo Exhibtion
Curatorial Statement
Erosion, the continual reconfiguration of the Earth’s surface materials, mirrors the subtle erosion and transformation of words’ meanings over time. Both natural processes have accelerated into urgent crises as human activity remains unchecked. Olivia Petrides addresses these dual conditions — environmental neglect and the manipulation of media discourse — and the ways they intertwine.
Her large-scale abstractions begin by chance: ink spilled across wet paper, fragments of newspapers pressed into the surface, texts and images half-absorbed, half-erased. From this process emerges an aesthetic of rupture and accumulation, recalling the layered posters on city walls — torn, superimposed, eroded. The resulting compositions are atmospheric and volatile, simultaneously evoking the raw power of natural forces and the dissonance of public discourse. They recall the sublime of Caspar David Friedrich's landscapes, reconstructed for our abstract and unromantic contemporary moment.
Donald Trump’s tweet, “Be There, Will Be Wild!” preceding the January 6th Capitol riot, takes center stage in Petrides’s largest triptych, where gestural strokes roar. This expressive representation of a political turning point appears with no order, yet maintains a loosely directed composition, alluding to greater systemic ripple effects; Trump’s methods are chaotic but nevertheless purposeful, catalyzing hatred that grows like Yeaworth’s the blob. Petrides constructs an overwhelming immersion reflecting her ongoing engagement with the churn of news cycles and her effort to make sense of the twisted language of contemporary media’s “post-truth” manic episode.
In her Flooding the Zone series, dynamic markings and invasive acid yellows evoke oil spill landscapes. They send alarming signals of toxic fluids infiltrating our waters. Oil and water don’t mix; their polarity becomes a metaphor for the divisive effects of today’s media landscape.
Navigating contemporary media requires constant piecing together of the truth. In The Persistence of Chaos, Petrides attempts to contain this pulsing disorder with geometric “nets” of logic stretched over a field of fluid havoc. As this blob continues to grow and overwhelm reason, the nets are tested as an effective container.
Despite distractions from ecological collapse and media misinformation, Petrides meets these crises head-on. Her work resists easy resolution, instead embodying the complexity, unease, and urgency of living in a world reshaped by human forces.
Exhibition Guide
About the Artist
Olivia Petrides has spent more than three decades teaching drawing and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is an Associate Adjunct Professor. Her path to art wasn’t straight: raised in a science-driven household by a wildlife ecologist father and a mother with a riotously colorful garden, she grew up in national parks and wild backyards. Art came later during a semester in Germany, and only after she had ignored the advice that it was “too late” to become an artist.
Influenced as much by William Kentridge and Mark Bradford as by the irreverence of the Chicago Imagists, Petrides insists on keeping both nature and politics present in her work. She has traveled from Africa to Iceland, Greenland to Alaska, always chasing fragile landscapes (she also keeps bees in her Chicago garden). Her practice, equal parts ecological and political, is animated by the urgency to resist numbness in the face of disinformation, and to register, in raw material form, the crises that define our age.
Public Engagement
Dialogue Group
Education
To engage with the conceptual points of Petrides’s work, the gallery hosted a dialogue group, aiming to share diverse perspectives on the artist’s work and exhibition.