Olive Ayhens creates inventive and personal interpretations of landscapes that amalgamate nature and man-made environments. In doing so, she becomes the composer of implausible worlds of juxtaposed skyscrapers perched on cliffsides, bison grazing in a cityscape, or bustling traffic in a remote desert. Playing with spatial organization and scale, Ayhens compresses and stretches uncanny realms into fantastical visions of improbable places. Critic Jerry Saltz has described Ayhens’ work as “intertwining postapocalyptic narratives and prelapsarian bliss… Part Bosch, part Coney Island of the mind’s eye, these works place us inside scenes of destruction as curious gods look into and down on widening worlds.”
Ayhens was active among a group of female Bay Area artists in the early 1970s who became known for work that drew upon feminist ideas, outsider and ethnographic art, and the Funk movement to explore more direct personal and social narratives. During this period, she was profoundly influenced by the form relationships of Pre-Colombian sculpture. Attracting the attention of California curators such as Philip Linhares and Whitney Chadwick, she appeared in group shows at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Center, Fresno Art Museum and Laguna Art Museum early in her career. For the past forty years, Ayhens has focused much of her practice on the creation of environmental allegories, each as whimsical as they are catastrophic, which fuse antithetical and imaginary worlds, warping viewers’ understanding of both space and place.
Ayhens upholds that her work is grounded in abstraction. She embraces the language and aesthetics of abstract painting in her focus on exploring color relationships, texture, scale, and the compression and expansion of space. Above all, Ayhens is driven by her “love of the paint itself- with layering it, with building textures, et cetera.” Ayhens has long been praised for her willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction in her color-rich, kaleidoscopic works in which linear perspective is not utilized to anchor space, but rather to destabilize it.
Simultaneously collapsing and expanding, corkscrewing and unraveling, Ayhens’s compositions evolve more or less autobiographically, taking from the many places where she has spent time, especially through the numerous residencies she has been awarded throughout her career. Ayhens strives to capture an essence of each place she composes, reconceptualizing, distorting, and rebuilding these places from her memory, her subconscious and, most importantly, from her imagination. Ayhens has taken care to deeply absorb the places she has spent time, as even her works featuring fragmented and amalgamated loci impart a profound and idiosyncratic sense of place. Her warping of space and place often imbues potent environmental implications into her works. Even so, in Ayhens’s creations, as The New Yorker's Andrea K. Scott articulates, "whimsy tends to outstrip dread.”
Olive Ayhens was born in Oakland, California, and received both her BFA and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and internationally. Ayhens has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant. She has completed residencies at Ucross, the Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaiso, the Salzburg Kunsterhaus, Yaddo Artist Residency, Djerassi Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Roswell Artist Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and at Schwandorf International, Bavaria. Today, Ayhens lives and works in New York City.