"My work is much involved with my love of the paint itself - with layering it, with building textures, etc. All this is striving for a sensual visual beauty. Color is my first language. I have fun with personification as well as improbabilities of scale. My work is heavily influenced thematically by my environment, both physical and spiritual."
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.”
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.