14th April – 31st May 2012

Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Brecon Road
Merthyr Tydfil
South Wales
CF47 8RE
Tel: +44 (0)1685 727371

Admission: Daily, 10am – 5.30 pm (last admission 5pm)

info@geoffreyolsen.com
museum@merthyr.gov.uk

The works selected for this exhibition reflect an engagement with the social history and industrial landscape of South Wales and in particular the landscape surrounding Merthyr Tydfil where Geoffrey Olsen grew up in Georgetown. His paintings are characterised by their strong relationship to landscape and memory. In many of the paintings shown here relationships can be established between the processes of layering, superimposition and obliteration in the paintings themselves and the specific dynamics of the Welsh landscape and by extension to the workings of memory. In the 1980s and 1990s Geoffrey Olsen produced a number of large-scale paintings in oil and acrylic that developed these ideas and ways of working to encompass themes of growth, decay and regeneration (Place of Burial Series, 1990s).

Of specific interest to this exhibition is the fact that Geoffrey was a pupil at Cyfarthfa Castle Grammar School during the 1950s. Paintings such as ‘Through Cyfarthfa’ (1982) carry very personal resonance when shown in this context, as do, ‘Around Pulmans Yard, Georgetown Merthyr Tydfil’ (1981) and ‘Ynysfach Winter Visits, No. 3′. Each of these paintings presented here furthers the sense that in many of the paintings there is a distinctive blurring of the relationship between the external and internal landscapes of self and place; windows are both literal and metaphorical. Throughout his life Geoffrey Olsen continued to draw on the landscape of South Wales alongside the inspiration that he drew from the other places in which he subsequently lived and worked; including Oxfordshire, Rome, Florence and Miami, Florida.

Geoffrey Olsen’s work has been exhibited internationally since 1974 at venues that include The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, US, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, Modern Art Oxford, UK and Camden Art Center, London. In 2009 The Frost Museum in Miami exhibited his large scale Miami. During 2000- 2006 there were solo exhibitions of his work at The Museum Of Modern Art, Wales, The National Library of Wales, The University of Surrey, Cheltenham Museum & Art Gallery, Brewhouse, Taunton and Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, Wales. In 1999 he was awarded an Abbey Award In Painting at the British School at Rome. Mixed exhibitions have included “Painting The Dragon” at The National Museum of Wales, UK,“Wales Drawing Biennale 2000”, Glyn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK. “Showcase Wales 2001” and Museum Of Modern Art, Wales. Geoffrey Olsen (1943-2007).

This work has been selected for exhibition by Geoffrey Olsen’s wife; the painter Valerie Jordan.

Download the flyer in PDF format

Click to download catalogue as PDF

Click to download extract as PDF

Extended Collage in Imminent Change

For Geoffrey Olsen painting was an activity of construction initiated by “the perception of an external world mediated through subjective experience at distinct points in time”. His paintings “oscillate between representation and abstraction” in precarious states. The “fragmentary images” that they incorporate “allude to past certainties” at the same time as they “exist in a condition of imminent change”.

In a statement about his work made shortly after he arrived in Miami he wrote:

“The parallels I perceive between painting and processes such as layering, superimposition, obliteration and the ways in which belief and value systems, particularly those that concern the built environment, can be constantly revised in the light of changing ideologies are of specific interest to my current work”. As this suggests, he worked in series and devised layering systems distinct to particular bodies of work. Series were often built up through a process of “extended collage”: selected fragments of existing works were recombined to make new ones. This way of working grew out of an early series of works on paper in the late 1970s that responded to the social history and industrial landscape of South Wales. In the 1980s and 1990s he produced a number of large-scale paintings in oil and acrylic that developed these ways of working to encompass themes of “growth, decay and regeneration”. This evolved into a growing interest in the Renaissance painting and architecture of Florence and Rome. The hidden and multiple levels of the mosaic filled church at San Clemente in Rome, whose darkness gives way to an intermittent dazzling surface of frescoes, provided an important reference point for his own practice and analogies he saw in the surfaces of the Miami landscape.

His practice was informed by European and American traditions, from European landscape painting, to Abstraction and medieval wall painting. He worked “to establish a sense of ambiguity, imprecision and flux” and to construct paintings that could “contain ambiguities of space, scale and meaning” in dynamic contradiction. This was further explored in the knowingly temporary paintings for walls he made during his first residency in F.I.U. in 1996-7.

Many of the Miami paintings were made “by pouring thinned acrylic paint onto the canvas laid flat, or by applying it directly to walls”. In the notes which he wrote to accompany the showing of the series entitled “Above Eighth Series” which he began in 2001 and continued to work on after he had been diagnosed and begun treatment for leukaemia, he wrote that they were “intended to reflect shifts and modifications to a given order, which although established also seems impermanent”.

Redell Olsen

All quotations are from exhibition statements made by Geoffrey Olsen.

Geoffrey Olsen: The Miami Paintings
The Frost Art Museum, Miami

September 2, 2009-October 4, 2009

Private View: Wednesday
 Sept. 2, 2009 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Florida International University,
University Park 10975 SW 17th Street
Miami, FL 33199

http://thefrost.fiu.edu/exhibitions.htm

Views of the current exhibition at The Frost Museum, Miami  (photographs by Jacek  Kolasinski)