Based in the western Catskills and New York City, artist Bobbie Oliver created the paintings in this exhibition at her upstate New York studio in the depths of winter 2019. Referencing the physicality and geographic place of their fabrication, these paintings use a palette of blues and greens, reflecting the rushing rivers and lush coniferous forests around her.

Oliver’s exploration of abstraction focuses keenly on the tactility of paint, physically manipulating it through pouring and blotting its excesses away. She alters the density of the paint by diluting it in varying degrees and pouring it on the surface with dazzling effects. With this focus on the surface, Oliver challenges gravity in the way she orients drips and movements of the paint. In this process, the artist is closely attuned to how the paint sits on the surface of the pictorial plane and sinks into the canvas.

These large-scale works draw inspiration from disparate movements and artists, including and not limited to Chinese landscape painting, Japanese calligraphy, Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, Canadian-American painter Philip Guston, and Roman frescoes. Much like her influences, Oliver’s work is concerned with the direct and gestural relationship established between the material and the artist’s hand. In this way, the presence of gesture is important as it allows one to re-examine and look for relationships in accidents.

The specter of her hand invites audiences to make sense of the emotion and vulnerability in its making on their own terms. Oliver’s artistic practice is loose, without a preconceived plan for the painting’s resolution, instead inviting improvisation, often painting on multiple canvases concurrently and pressing them up among each other. They are resolved by the delicate richness in relationships, rhythms and densities of dichotomies and variances.