Statement
I am interested in what happens when painting refuses to cohere—the perceptual instability this produces, the way a viewer’s eye and mind negotiate between evocative movement in illusory space and the insistent materiality of the painted surface. This is not a failure of resolution. It is the subject.
I disrupt the gesture before it resolves, fracturing it with redactions, value scales, misregistrations, color, and competing visual languages. Spray paint interrupts brushwork. Hard-edge geometry arrests improvised mark-making. Layers accumulate and dissolve, leaving traces of revision that cannot be fully decoded.
The work resists coherent narrative and thwarts the comfort of a single language, implicating the viewer’s own witness in an unresolved uncertainty. If certainty is its own kind of tyranny, what does it mean that we still say ‘seeing is believing’? What is it, finally, to be a witness to our times?
I make paintings that refuse to tell you what to see. In that refusal is a conviction — that uncertainty, held honestly, is not equivocation, but a form of clarity and freedom.
— M. Pettee Olsen
Biography
M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen (b. 1963, Rochester, New York) is an American abstract painter whose work investigates gestural abstraction, perceptual instability, and conceptual disruption.
Her paintings introduce redactions, misregistrations, and competing visual languages into gestural abstraction — pressing against the traditions of the New York School to test what remains when its certainties are questioned and its narratives allowed to fall away.
An early and intensive immersion in dance, along with painting, is evident in her ability to body forth her artistic vision.
Pettee Olsen holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where painting department head Al Wunderlich introduced her to Susan Rothenberg, who visited her studio. Their discussions over shared concerns with movement and psychologically evocative painting placed her in early dialogue with painters in New York.
At the beginning of her career, she worked in large-scale fine art printmaking, assisting across two presses. This provided daily engagement with the unique printing projects of Frank Stella, Barbara Kruger, James Rosenquist, and others, ultimately co-founding Oberon Press LTD, NYC, in TriBeCa, as curator. This immersion in multiple visual languages has remained foundational to her practice.
She holds an MA from Columbia University, where she subsequently taught painting on an ad hoc basis in the Department of Art and Art Education. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at The Garrison Art Center, New York (2024); a four-person exhibition at Vassar College’s Palmer Gallery (2023), and a group show at Art Cake/M. David & Co., Brooklyn, curated by John Yau (2025). She is a fellow of the Ucross Foundation.
She has exhibited at Columbia University, Vassar College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Center for Visual Art at Metropolitan State University, among others.
Pettee Olsen lives and works in Litchfield County, Connecticut