For the last couple of years Canadian artist Erik Olson has been working almost exclusively on portraiture works, developing a wider range of representations of the individual. During his recent, highly productive stay @ The La Brea Residency in LA, he created a new series of large oils on canvas as well as smaller oils on paper, further experimenting with the traditional format.
The La Brea Residency is run by an artist and art collector Danny First who invites artists to stay in his space in central LA and create work that often results in exhibition at The Cabin, a small exhibition space in Hollywood. Swapping his current hometown of Düsseldorf with sunny LA, Olson created a fresh body of work in a more spontaneous and intuitive way. The result is a series of mostly large works that range from objective, observation based representations, to half cropped or framed portraits, to more abstracted, obscured geometric formations. All within the frame of a classic "bust", head and shoulders format, these paintings vary between depicting the individual in a classic analytic sense and using what is perhaps beyond knowledge. Through such approaches Olson questions which features can portray someone, making an analogy with the characteristics that define a person in social context. Selection of these new works will stay on view @ The Cabin until early June.