Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present Secrets in Place, a solo exhibition of work by artist Olive Ayhens, on view December 14th, 2023 through February 4th, 2024.
Secrets in Place, Ayhens’s first exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, presents a selection of oil paintings and ink and watercolor works from the mid-1990s to the present. 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 into "jumbled panoramas,” according to Hyperallergic's Stephen Maine. Her inventive contemporary landscapes amalgamate nature and man-made environments, creating implausible realms of juxtaposed skyscrapers perched on cliffsides on Northern California, as seen in Bejeweling the Massif (2009), or bustling traffic in a remote desert, as seen in Outskirts of Roswell (2014). Critic Jerry Saltz has described Ayhens’s 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.”
