Pop surrealist Kathie Olivas is showing more than 40 paintings, prints and sculptures in her “Sweet and Sorrow” solo exhibition at the Stranger Factory.
In her Velasquez-paints-Betty-Boop style, Olivas depicts mutant children in a post-apocalyptic world. Her skillfully executed work bridges European and American art history with the history of Japanese animation art also known as anime that began in 1917 and became a global phenomenon in the 1980s.
Because of its ties with commercial art forms like cartoon filmmaking and comic book illustration, pop surrealism, also known as lowbrow art, has struggled to gain respect from mainstream curators and critics.
| If you go WHAT: “Sweet and Sorrow,” more than 40 paintings and sculptures by Kathie Olivas WHEN: Through July 31 WHERE: Stranger Factory, 109 Carlisle NE, just north of Central. 508-3049 HOW MUCH: Free |
However, during the 1960s, Chicago Imagists like Jim Nutt broke through critical resistance to gain global recognition. First-generation pop surrealists like Nutt and his wife, Gladys Nilsson, were inspired by German expressionism, European surrealism and cartoon art from film and comic strips.
Nutt was a beacon for his Midwestern contemporaries like Emily Trovillion (disclosure: who is my wife) and others who broke away from the linear view of history superimposed on art by curatorial cultural masters while ironically garnering their respect and admiration.
Olivas also is the master of her aesthetic universe with a wonderful skill set and a deep psychological and philosophical storyline. She is truly inventive, whether building four-tentacle and bejeweled giant dolls like “Encrusted Elizabeth” or painting wide-eyed little girls chewing the ears of their bunny toys like “Unresolved.”
Her charmingly scary little girls and boys emblemize the hidden effects of climate change triggered by massive pollution and the emotional and environmental ravages left behind by war-for-profit enterprises. Through her sad-eyed children of the apocalypse Olivas quietly admonishes us to clean up our act before devastating our only known home in the universe.
It is that heartfelt message of alarm and skillful European master execution that elevate Olivas’ works far above the often crassly commercial and thinly rendered new crop of pop surrealists.
Olivas studied printmaking and painting at the University of South Florida while living in Tampa before becoming fascinated with early American naive portraits of children at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her impromptu studies led Olivas to a visceral understanding of the strange nature of cuteness found in those early portraits. As prototype adults children offer myriad possibilities for the future of humanity. From lords of the flies and children of the corn to the Greek philosophers, children are open to become anything.
In “Masked Elizabeth (We are all Infinity),” Olivas depicts a young girl wearing a domino and an Archie cartoon Jughead-style hat while holding a separate skull mask in front of her. A leafless tree magically occupies the right eye socket of the skull.
Olivas’ “Ethereal” features a multitentacled young girl wearing a cap with bunny ears. Her Victorian-style ruffled and pleated dress in sepia tones adds another layer of mystery. Despite its otherworldly qualities “Ethereal” evokes the feeling of an image found in a shoebox full of old vernacular photographs.
Olivas owns a gallery and toy store in the Duke City. It is not, however, a vanity gallery to showcase Olivas. Her Stranger Factory is more like a place to be immersed in a pop surrealist world surrounded by works by many artists in the genre.
Take a look.
