27 August 2025
So many thing to unpack from seeing Olivia van Kuiken's show (Bastard Rhyme at Matthew Brown) and visiting her studio after. Firstly: her free-standing, double-sided paintings with pictorial images on their front sides greeting the viewer upon walking into the space and monochrome color blocks on their backs that turns the space into a color field installation when the viewer reaches the back of the room. This was a remarkable effect—the front sides engage with and are perhaps completed by the viewer, the audience key to their resistance of the extradiegetic gaze (especially the three bust paintings that are on the left side when you walk in, each one averting their eyes from the possibility of that fourth wall fracture in spite of their centered positions). They're human-size and human-like, their implied momentum often pushing from left to right, trying to escape the edges of their containers to the periphery. But once at the back of the room, their muted monochrome (dyed canvas) backsides create a sense that they've turned away, subservient to the high-hung untitled work that pays homage to the installation of Malevich's 1913 suprematist square in 1915's The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10. At Olivia's studio I told her about someone walking into the show while I was absorbing the color field, and how I immediately hid behind one of the works to avoid them, averting my gaze in the process.