Olive Madora Ayhens (born 1943), is an American visual artist. She first gained recognition in California in the 1970s for stylized figurative work, but is most known for the fantastical, dizzying cityscapes, landscapes and interiors, often depicting New York City, that she has painted since the mid-1990s.Albright, Thomas. Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, University of California Press, 1985, p. 259. ISBN 9780520051935.Johnson, Ken. "Olive Ayhens," The New York Times, May 16, 2003. p. E35. Retrieved February 15, 2023.Saltz, Jerry. "See Olive Ayhens: Interior Wilderness," New York Magazine, June 16–29, 2014, p. 102. These works intermingle the urban and pastoral, and inside and outside, employing absurd juxtapositions, improbabilities of scale and vibrant colors, in pointed but playful explorations of the clash between civilization and nature.Gilltrap, Angela. "Urban Impact," The Artist's Magazine, October 2007, p. 48–51.Pollack, Barbara. "Olive Ayhens," ARTnews, 2014, p. 98.Lebowitz, Cathy. "Olive Ayhens at Gary Tatintsian," Art In America, May 2002. New York Sun critic David Cohen has described her images as "poised between the lyrical and the apocalyptic. They capture both the poetry and the politics of the densely populated, literally and metaphorically stratified, used and abused city."Cohen, David. "Gallery Going: Olive Ayhens," The New York Sun, November 18, 2004. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.Scott, Andrea K. "Olive Ayhens," The New Yorker, December 2, 2019, p. 5. Retrieved February 15, 2023.Maine, Stephen. "Painting the Wilderness of the Artistic Imagination," Hyperallergic, June 26, 2014. Retrieved February 15, 2023.
Ayhens has been recognized with a Guggenheim FellowshipJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Olive Ayhens," Fellows. Retrieved February 15, 2023. and awards from the Joan Mitchell, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb and Pollock-Krasner foundations.Artforum. "Joan Mitchell Foundation Names 2020 Artists-in-Residence," News, January 29, 2020. Retrieved February 15, 2023.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Olive Ayhens, Artists. Retrieved February 16, 2023.Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. Olive Ayhens, RAiR 2014–5. Retrieved February 16, 2023. She has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), American Academy of Arts & Letters,Cohen, David. "Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at American Academy of Arts and Letters," Artcritical, March 11, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 2023. Roswell MuseumBerrones, Ray. "A Life Journey Told Through Art," Vision Magazine/Roswell Daily Record, Roswell Art Museum, January 15, 2015, p. 13-14. and New York State Museum.New York State Museum. "Reflecting on September 11, 2001," Exhibitions, 2011. Retrieved February 16, 2023. Her work belongs to the public collections of MTA Arts & Design in New York,MTA Arts & Design. Reflection, Olive Ayhens, Collection. Retrieved February 16, 2023. the Oakland Museum of CaliforniaLowry, Vicky. "Olive Ayhens," Elle Decor, June/July 2015, p. 60–64. Retrieved February 16, 2023. and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art,Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. Cinnamon Rose, Olive Ayhens, Collection. Retrieved February 16, 2023. among others.
Early life and career Olive Madora Ayhens was born and raised in Oakland, California. She decided to become an artist at age 18 and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where she earned BFA and MFA degrees (1968, 1969), while producing figurative work influenced by Pre-Columbian art, early modernists and Abstract Expressionism.Yaniv, Etty. "Olive Ayhens: Unique Improbabilities," Art Spiel, October 21, 2019. Retrieved February 15, 2023.
Ayhens was active among a group of female Bay Area artists in the early 1970s (among them, Judith Linhares and M. Louise Stanley), who became known for work that drew upon feminist ideas, outsider and ethnographic art, and the Funk movement to explore more direct, personal and social narratives.Love, Barbara J. Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006, p. 24. ISBN 9780252097478.Chadwick, Whitney. Bay Area Narrative Painting, San Francisco: San Francisco State University, 1981.Albright, Thomas. "The Vital Art of Four Feminists," San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 1974, p. 12–13. Attracting the attention of California curators such as Philip Linhares and Whitney Chadwick, she appeared in group shows at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Center, Fresno Art Museum and Laguna Art Museum, and had solo exhibitions at the SFAI (1972), SFMOMA Artist Gallery (1989) and Michael Himovits Gallery (1991–94), among other venues.Linhares, Philip. Four Women, San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1974.McColm, Del. "From Anguish to Humor," Davis Enterprise, May 2, 1985, p. 4–5.Webster, Mary Hull. "Perils of the Artist-Hero," Artweek, Vol. 22, 1991.
In 1996, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio grant led to Ayhens's move to New York City. The change directed her subject matter toward cityscapes, the collision of natural and urban elements, and ecological concern. A subsequent Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views residency providing 91st-floor studio space in the World Trade Center shifted her work further, toward bird's-eye-view panoramas that she likened to studying an organism under a microscope.Morrone, Francis. "A New Yorker at Heart & in Paint," The New York Sun, August 16, 2007, p. 17. Retrieved February 15, 2023.
In her later career, Ayhens has had solo exhibitions at Gary Tatintsian Gallery (2002–03),Nadelman, Cynthia. "Olive Ayhens," ARTnews, May 2005, p. 147. Mid-Manhattan Public Library (2007), Frederieke Taylor Gallery (2007¬–09)Naves, Mario. "Olive Ayhens: Nature/Architecture at Frederieke," City Arts, November 17, 2009, p. 11. and Bookstein Projects (2012–19),Saltz, Jerry. " See Olive Ayhens: Visionary drawings and paintings," New York Magazine, July 3, 2020, p. 78. all in New York, and at the Roswell Museum (2015). Her work has also been featured in various editions of Harper's Magazine since 2001.Harpers. Olive Ayhens Archive. Retrieved February 15, 2023.Harpers. "Grand Central Inside/Outside," May 29, 2013. Retrieved February 15, 2023.Harpers. "War Endures, Olive Ayhens" January 2016. Retrieved February 15, 2023.
Work and reception Ayhens's work is inspired by her physical environment—places lived in or traveled to—and in that way, has been described as almost biographical. She works from on-site sketches, collected imagery, memory, and ultimately, imagination, yet according to Hyperallergic'''s Stephen Maine, remains grounded in a "willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction." Her packed compositions fuse contradictory and imaginary realms into "jumbled panoramas" that have been described as "urban visionary," expressionist, folk-like,Naves, Mario. "Lovely Litter," New York Observer, May 19, 2003, p. 20. raucous and "both apocalyptic and joyous."Naves, Mario. "The City as Artist' Muse: NYC Before and After 9/11," New York Observer, December 20, 2004. Critics have compared her art to that of well-known cityscape artists Rackstraw Downes and Yvonne Jacquette, Hieronymus Bosch and expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and George Grosz.
Ayhens presents catastrophic environmental allegories that she offsets with a loose painting style employing saturated, hues, unexpected juxtapositions, and a warped sense of space. The New Yorkers Andrea K. Scott suggested Ayhens's work was what might result "if modernist Florine Stettheimer had crossed paths with Greta Thunberg": colorful, kaleidoscopic composite paintings addressing climate change in which "whimsy tends to outstrip dread." Stephen Maine suggests that a central, animating paradox of Ayhens's work is a contradiction between its profusion of eccentric pictorial detail and its ambiguous intent which encompasses "cultural symbol, narrative device, autobiographical marker, or just the fun of paint."Mount, Ferdinand. "Aprés Brexit," Lettre International, May/June 2020.
Early work, 1970s and 1980s Critics related Ayhens's early figurative watercolors and oils to the work of Kandinsky and Miró in its use of color and organic forms, respectively, to suggest emotional states, while distinguishing it from both in its more explicit forms grounded in reality.Platt, Susan. "Olive Ayhens," Images & Issues, March/April 1984, p. 37.Dunham, Judith L. "Olive M. Ayhens," Artweek, August 4, 1973. Reviewers described these works as energetically expressive, lyrical "psychic explorations," whose personal narratives—often exploring female sexuality—also evoked the universal, ritualistic and archetypal.McKenna, Kathryn. "Gallery keeps contemporary art afloat," Austin American-Statesman, November 8, 1981. In brightly painted, intricate compositions she played on variations of aboriginal human, natural and fantasy forms stylized into tapestry-like patterns (e.g., Nutty Woman and Calm Man, 1971) or surrounded by seas of organic and decorative elements that suggested instability and the power of greater forces (Love in the Water, 1980).McCann, Cecile N. "Four Women— And One," Artweek, October 3, 1974, p. 13. Critic Charles Shere termed them "landscapes of the interior teem[ing] with life, microscopic organisms and insect-organs that depict the feeling of … an ecstatically protracted moment."Shere, Charles. "Absorbing look at real life through 'funk art' at Mills College exhibit," The Oakland Tribune, February 15, 1984, p. C-6. In many works, a brighter sense of the ongoing-ness of life and its passages or a raucous sense of humor predominated, as in Love Among the Spiders (1983), which the Berkeley Express described as a "twitchy, tactile drawing … suggesting a view of intercourse from the inside out."Kossy, Barbara. "The Story of X, X-Rated: Erotic Art by Northern California," Berkeley Express, July 6, 1984.Weidman, Lisa. "A Manic-Depressive Show," Suttertown News, May 9, 1985, p. 6.
In the 1980s, Ayhens's art became more influenced by her surroundings and environmental concerns, and moved closer to her mature style.Bodo, Nancy. "Olive Ayhens/Lenore Gray Gallery," Art New England, July/August 1990. These watercolor and ink landscapes were characterized by a whimsical brightness that pushed them beyond the representational toward the imaginative, often conveyed through tongue-in-cheek, jumbled buildings and trees. Artweek''' called them "anxious amalgam(s) of ideal and concrete, nature and civilization" offering "a vision of manic inclusiveness [that] pushes just to the edge of holding together the contradictions of contemporary life."
New York works (1996–2006) Ayhens's expressionistic New York series The Esthetics of Pollution (1996) denoted both her cross-coastal transition (e.g., Montana Creeps Into NYC, 1996) and her response to that city's teeming urban environment. Arts Magazine critic Robert Mahoney described the series' title work as "an energetic, Red Grooms-like panorama of a lower Manhattan surrounded by green slime" whose skyline that seemed "to be melting like a birthday cake in acid rain."Mahoney, Robert. "Aerial Perspectives," Time Out New York, August 7–14, 1997, p.47. The New York Timess Roberta Smith characterized that work as a "wonderfully jaundiced … energetically perverted postcard image."Smith, Roberta. "Aerial Perspectives," The New York Times, August 1, 1997, p. C25. Retrieved February 15, 2023.