Silvia Olabarría
Bilbao, 1974
CV
DownloadSilvia Olabarría understands painting as an exercise in which signs, signals, stains and marks confront each other, seeking for a plastic result that generates a deep aesthetic emotion, a place and time to be while looking at a painting. Apparently contradictory according to the tradition that affirms that figurative is the opposite of abstraction, the elements that make up her works sometimes have characteristics of both. Mechanized and industrial aspects participate in her works, as well as organic; improvised strokes are intermingled with the imagined and controlled. The vulnerability and fragility of the silhouettes on paper in front of the melodramatic gesture of the laser cut.
Recently, she has strengthened a personal language around the process, which has used techniques and tools to broaden it, making it the main character of the painting, making it visible. The ultimate end—the form, or the plastic result—is something that she finds, sometimes in the field of uncertainty, in the practice of doubt. She is lately interested in voids, in the fragments and in what is covered and makes it impossible to see the whole field of an image, when she uses templates, she makes interruption an essential element.
The ability to recompose and a kind of negative quality like erasing the blank space, brings to the forefront the most performative and improvisational actions in painting, those linking her with the more gestural tradition of abstract expressionism (Erased de Kooning, painting by Robert Rauschenberg). She also looks at the avant-garde and cubism and their experiments, included in Kurt Schwitters’ rooms, and at the same time to the most contemporary painting which, with a critical attitude, introduces into the pictorial medium the aesthetics of the strange, “silly,” or ironic like Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl or Jacqueline Humphries.
Recently, she has strengthened a personal language around the process, which has used techniques and tools to broaden it, making it the main character of the painting, making it visible. The ultimate end—the form, or the plastic result—is something that she finds, sometimes in the field of uncertainty, in the practice of doubt. She is lately interested in voids, in the fragments and in what is covered and makes it impossible to see the whole field of an image, when she uses templates, she makes interruption an essential element.
The ability to recompose and a kind of negative quality like erasing the blank space, brings to the forefront the most performative and improvisational actions in painting, those linking her with the more gestural tradition of abstract expressionism (Erased de Kooning, painting by Robert Rauschenberg). She also looks at the avant-garde and cubism and their experiments, included in Kurt Schwitters’ rooms, and at the same time to the most contemporary painting which, with a critical attitude, introduces into the pictorial medium the aesthetics of the strange, “silly,” or ironic like Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl or Jacqueline Humphries.
Available artworks
El instante-ya, 2025
Ya es otro ahora, 2025
Ahora es un instante, 2024
¿De qué color es el infinito espacial?, 2024
Es del color del aire, 2024
Fluencia, 2024
Pingalá, 2024
Susumna, 2024
Cuerpos gravitatorios I, 2024
Estrellas orbitando I, 2024
Estrellas orbitando II, 2024
Estrellas orbitando III, 2024
Estrella 1, 2024
Estrella 2, 2024
Estrella 3, 2024
Estrella 10, 2024
Luna 5, 2024
Luna 6, 2024
Luna 7, 2024
Luna 9, 2024
Lunas, 2024
Mondrian on the Dancefloor (Lee Krasner), 2024
Por la mañana, lluvia, 2024
Heart's release, 2024
Serie Crossover (Xilografía Roja), 2024
Serie Crossover (Xilografía Azul), 2024
Serie Crossover (Xilografía Amarilla), 2024
Serie Crossover (Block DM Negro), 2023
Crezco en tus ojos. Pale blue eyes 2, 2023
Serie Crossover (Chica), 2023
Serie Crossover (Xilografía de Perfilado), 2023
Serie Crossover (Block Orange), 2023
Serie Crossover (Xilografía Negra, positivo), 2023
Serie Crossover (Xilografía Negra, negativo), 2023
When night comes, 2023
FIVE, 2022
SIX, 2022
EIGHT, 2022
NINE, 2022
TEN, 2022
ELEVEN, 2022
TWELVE, 2022
THIRTEEN, 2022
FIFTEEN, 2022
SIXTEEN, 2022
No parpadee 1, 2022
El agua seca, 2023
No parpadee 2, 2022
Mojado oscuro, 2022
Crystal Clear, 2022
Líneas sobre lienzo, 2022
Todo lo que veo me sobrevivirá, 2012
