Out of Joint - Amos Eno Gallery
Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Out of Joint, a solo exhibition of recent works (Retroglyphs) by David Olivant - on view February 2 through February 26, 2023. The opening reception will be on Friday Feb 3 from 6 - 8 at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, across the street from the Morgan Ave L train stop.
This show is Olivant’s first in NYC after his debut here at the Center for International Contemporary Arts. Kay Larson, sent to review the “New British Painting” at the Queen’s Museum for New York Magazine, wrote; “David Olivant made me rethink my stereotypes of British artists, the “New British Painting” is bound up in sentiment.” She asserted that Olivant’s work looked “fresh and unorthodox” and that “By contrast, American painters of Olivant’s generation seem to falter over the technical issues with depressing frequency”.
Fast forward to 2015 and this is what Mark Van Proyen, Donald Kuspit’s successor, had to say of Olivant’s recent work - “its achievement lies within a canny balancing of charm, pathos and absurdity that uses figurative fragments to slyly suggest how each of these aspects is a function of the others… “making them comparable to the figures painted by Robert Colescott or R.B. Kitaj—only here, they are players in much more complicated narrative dramas that are open to a far greater number of interpretations.”
In a 2022 catalog essay Van Proyen states of the characters in Olivant’s recent work- “They live in a Sartrean hell of programmatic indifference, impassively seeking salvation from a runaway complexity that changes guises while moving in rhetorical circles. Nonetheless, it is their hell…”
David Olivant earned his MA at The Royal College of Art in London. He was recipient of a British Council Scholarship to India and has had solo shows in New Delhi, NYC, Chicago, Dusseldorf, Santa Fe, and San Bernardino. Olivant moved to the US in 1991 and taught at CSU-Stanislaus for 25 years. He now lives in Santa Fe NM.
Amos Eno Gallery
56 BOGART ST, BROOKLYN, NY 11206
THU – SUN, 12-6 • 718-237-3001 • AMOSENOGALLERY@GMAIL.COM • AMOSENO.ORG