Frieze 91 members are warmly invited to join artist Alex Olson for a Private Tour of her studio in West Adams, Los Angeles.
Alex Olson is an American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Born in 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts, she received her BA from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2001 and a MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California in 2008. Olson’s works might appear abstract, but that’s not how she would choose to refer to them: “In fact, the way I approach painting is almost the opposite in that nothing is an abstraction of something else,” she says. “It literally is what it is.” Olson’s paintings aim to be exact records of how they were made, self-evident in their construction. What characterize her works are layers of marks, made not only by traditional means of painting, but also by scraping away and dragging the paint to create textured surfaces. Her canvases are also notable for their incredibly thin stretchers, giving the impression of the painting being almost flush with the wall. Her visual inspiration comes from a wide range of sources, including textile design, architectural surfaces, facades, and graphic design.