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.
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
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 majority of the painting feels entirely random, unable to be described or put in a box. Embodying the abstractness of “Imploding Meaning,” … with the only undeniable quality being the talent and care put into the piece.
-Arts Editor Ganesh Pillai, Miscellany News, Vassar — on the paintings of M. Pettee Olsen
…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
…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
…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. All of Pettee Olsen’s paintings have an ethereal glow, almost glistening.
-Michael Paglia, WestWord review of WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION, William Havu Gallery
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
Insistently interactive, Pettee Olsen’s canvases are mutable perceptual events that partake of ambiguity, boundlessness, and sensation.
Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian and curator