Statement
I am interested in what happens when painting refuses to cohere—the perceptual instability this produces, and the way a viewer’s mind negotiates 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.
My studio practice systematically disrupts the gesture before it can resolve, fracturing the plane with severe redactions, value scales, and competing visual languages. Spray paint deliberately interrupts fluid brushwork, while hard-edge geometry arrests improvised mark-making. Layers accumulate and dissolve, leaving behind traces of tactical revision that resist an easily decoded narrative. By shifting between raw pigments and modern interference materials, the work actively destabilizes the canvas edge and challenges the viewer’s own optical witness.
If certainty is its own tyranny, what does it mean that we still say “seeing is believing”? I make paintings that refuse to dictate sight. In that refusal sits a distinct conviction: that holding uncertainty honestly is not equivocation, but a vital willingness to see without the comfort of art historical preconception.
— M. Pettee Olsen
Biography
M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen (b. 1963, Rochester, NY) is an American 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 fall away. An early and intensive immersion in dance informs her ability to body forth a visceral, kinetic painterly vision.
Pettee Olsen holds a BFA 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 an early, formative dialogue with New York painting. At the beginning of her career, she worked in large-scale fine art printmaking across two presses, providing daily engagement with the unique Varick Street print projects of Frank Stella, Barbara Kruger, and James Rosenquist. At age 24, she co-founded Oberon Press NYC in TriBeCa, an intense immersion in multiple visual systems that remains foundational to her contemporary practice.
She holds an MA from Columbia University, where she 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, NY (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). A fellow of the Ucross Foundation, she has exhibited at Columbia University, Vassar College, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Center for Visual Art in Denver, among others. Pettee Olsen lives and works in Litchfield County, Connecticut.