Biography

Margaret Pettee Olsen (American, 1963) is best known for her conceptually loaded and spatially dynamic abstract paintings. “I’m preoccupied with altering perception and usual orientations in looking and seeing,” she has said. Influences are a nascent career in dance, and professional work in the New York printmaking world, where she steeped herself in the visual language of post-war painter-printers, pop, and other artists. Pettee Olsen established the professional lithography press, Oberon Press, in TriBeCa in the early 1990s as founding curator. She has since primarily focused on painting. With its emphasis on color-shifting-paint finishes and an illusory sense of fractured yet fluid space, her paintings have been described as “insistently interactive.” They hint at what it would mean for sculpture, should it be collapsed into alternative space. They suggest a view that is dynamic, multivalent, and complex. Margaret Pettee Olsen maintains studios in Denver, Colorado, and the Hudson River Valley, in New York.