OLYA AVSTREYH ODD WINDS
08.03 – 18.05
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Serene Gallery is pleased to announce "Odd Winds", Olya Avstreyh’s first solo exhibition in Lugano (and second solo show in Switzerland), which opens March 8 and runs through May 18.
The gallery presents new large-scale paintings, as well as smaller drawings and canvases from the Odd Winds series, which the artist created especially for the exhibition. In this project, Avstreyh revisits her girlhood nostalgias, capturing the vulnerability, isolation, and uncertainty of the modern times. In her dynamic, expressionist works, Olya Avstreyh explores the drama of modern womanhood. Often void of an obvious narrative, her enigmatic paintings tell the story of a human being lost in confusion. Whether it’s acrylic on canvas or oil on paper, she, paradoxically, uses mostly vibrant hues to create her dark fantasies, which are both ambiguous and bewitching. Through recurring images of ferocious female or genderless figures, either bent or turned away from the viewer, and grotesque faces thrown into a deep nostalgia mood, she examines the complexity and awkwardness of human behaviour and the sense of alienation that she believes defines her generation. |
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Essay by Bella Bonner-Evans“Girlhood is a story of desire; innocence; fall from innocence…There's so much storytelling in girlhood. There's so much revision in telling it”. ― Jenny Zhang (Quote from an interview with OFFICE Magazine, 2017)
This quote by American writer and essayist Jenny Zhang, a commentary on her debut short story collection Sour Heart (2017), epitomises the themes at the heart of Olya Avstreyh’s debut exhibition with SERENE Gallery in Lugano, Switzerland. Exploring immigrant adolescent experience through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City, Sour Heart conjures the awkward, anxiety-driven, dislocated and at times disturbing reality of the in-between years - the period when one is neither an innocent child, nor a knowing adult; the crippling age when harsh truths dawn on unsuspecting ears and introspection is the only escape. Russian-born and currently based in Israel, Avstreyh is no stranger to the displacement Zhang describes. Alienated by the recent acts of extreme violence performed by both her native and current home country’s governments, she has been on a journey inward since beginning her artistic career in earnest in 2020. While producing this expansive new body of work, a feverish, almost manic act, the artist returned to the predilections of her youth in an attempt to carve out a space of belonging - “I feel like I’ve come full circle”, she notes, “And I am running back to the things I’ve always loved: my tumblr, journaling, literature, absurdities, enigmas and daydreaming”. The outcome of this interior odyssey, ODD WINDS manifests the melancholic and introverted form of femininity that defined the latter part of this self-confessed late-bloomer’s teens and early twenties. Inherently rhizomatic, the deeply personal pieces on show represent an act of web-weaving akin to the re-blogging of images on a Tumblr page. Across the exhibition, the artist unashamedly recalls, revisits and intertwines the desperate yet formative cultural artefacts that she first accessed as a teen, and carries with her as an adult. |
Olya often works from photographic material, either sourced from films, fashion archives, or taken by herself — pictures of friends asking them to evoke a certain emotion or pose, often joining herself as an extra figure. A haunting, uncanny effect is what draws her interest. My characters often look imperfect and confused, because I’m confused, — she says Her visual language draws on a diverse range of influences, including femininity, romance and rebellion, coated in a veneer of melancholia. She also fixates on the idea of metamorphosis and androgynous beauty, both human or animalistic, enthusiastically researching 70s British folk-horror films, where the everyday becomes newly estranged. The results are large-scale brushy canvases that tell stories rooted in dark fantasies of isolation and transformation of the self, and intimate smaller works — sensual close-ups of desire and lost innocence. |
