M Pettee Olsen’s Falling Away, 60 x 144 in. is one of two paintings acquired for a corporate collection.
— New York, New York
Yellow Slip with Value Scale, installed as part of a corporate collection
— New York, New York
M. Pettee Olsen embraces luminous surfaces, mark-making vitality, and diverse painting methods… to address perception’s changeable nature and subvert absolutist narratives through color and light.
—ARTFORUM
In Their Studios – In conversation with M Pettee Olsen
sweeping brushstrokes are at once spontaneous and choreographed, suggesting a painter who confidently engages her whole body in the creative process… She uses a variety of paint media, including some with reflective properties, to play with luminosity, depth, and perception. Indeed, Pettee Olsen is interested in how we perceive the world, how we interpret it through our respective lenses, and finally, how we form narratives around our subjective experiences.
-Meg Hitchcock
The James Palmer Gallery, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
IMPLODING MEANING, curated by Monica Church
ART CURIOUS-CONTEMPORARY – IMPLODING MEANING – A Reflection by M Pettee Olsen
Palmer Gallery Exhibit Explores the Importance of Abstraction by Ganesh Pillai
…unable to be described or put in a box. Embodying the abstractness of “Imploding Meaning,…”
-Arts Editor Ganesh Pillai, Miscellany News, Vassar
— on the paintings of M. Pettee Olsen
SHOUTOUT MIAMI – Interview with M Pettee Olsen by Sofia Ramirez
…unrelenting curiosity about what paint can suggest and where it can take us – perceptually, emotionally, and intellectually.
– M Pettee Olsen in conversation for SHOUTOUT MIAMI
ELEMENTAL FICTIONS
Elemental Fictions, A group exhibition curated by Jessica Nissen and Lowell Boyers
The Coral Door, New York, New York
with invited commentary by Art Historian Stephanie Grilli, Yale PhD
THINGLY AFFINITIES, Rethinking Aesthetic Form for a Posthumanist Future – An online symposium directed by Taney Roniger, New York, New York
THINGLY AFFINITIES – Symposium by Taney Roniger
…Pettee Olsen works with refraction, dissimilar actions and strategies, as well color bars and floaters that partake of boundlessness, and sensation. With reconfiguring planes and light-reflective media, the paintings resist any coherent reading and are insistently perceptually interactive…
-Stephanie Grilli, art historian, PhD Yale – Thingly Affinities symposium, conducted by Taney Roniger, New York, New York
William Havu Gallery, Denver Colorado
WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION
…polymer-layered canvases that are painted in broadly brushed swaths of organic tangles, drips and markings she calls “edits.”
– Susan Froyd, Arts writer for WestWord – Village Voice
Striking and beautifully conceived.
-Michael Paglia, WestWord review of WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION,
All of Pettee Olsen’s paintings have an ethereal glow, almost glistening.
William Havu Gallery
Coalesce, Goodwin F/A , Denver Colorado
The Last Exhibition
COALESCE | Group Exhibition
The show also reveals Goodwin’s interest in contemporary abstraction, especially paintings and works on paper that are expressive but often non-objective. Among the artists in this group are Margaret Pettee Olsen…
-Michael Paglia, WestWord review of Goodwin F/A Presents Final Show – Coalesce
THE REALITY OF ABSTRACTION — Paintings by MARGARET PETTEE OLSEN
CO Yale Association Artist-Curator-Talk
MUTUAL ART, M PETTEE OLSEN – RELAY, curated by Stephanie Grilli
RELAY – Paintings by Margaret Pettee Olsen, curated by art historian Stephanie Grilli, Yale PhD
808 Projects, Denver, Colorado
Insistently interactive, Pettee Olsen’s canvases are mutable perceptual events that partake of ambiguity, boundlessness, and sensation.
Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian and curator