Work in Progress: Olivia van Kuiken—“My paintings are always a surprise, even to me”

“Work in Progress” is a series of interviews with artists showing their latest work at Frieze fairs. Speaking from her Brooklyn studio as she prepares to exhibit new paintings and drawings with Château Shatto at Frieze New York, Olivia van Kuiken talks about finding inspiration in 18th-century set design and the French Revolution, and how she knows when a project is ready to put to rest.

Livia Russell How is your practice currently evolving?

Olivia van Kuiken My paintings spawn from myriad references, and are often elliptical in their evolution. Top of my mind is how to get my paintings to interact with architecture and really start to build a world. I've been thinking a lot about set design, the French Revolution and Eadweard Muybridge. I've been revisiting Marat/Sade, a play by Peter Weiss. It’s a play within a play: the inner shell is about the death of Marat and the French Revolution, and the outer shell is about the Marquis de Sade conversing with a bunch of French mental-hospital patients a few years after the revolution. He’s questioning why the hospital patients would choose a political alignment when none of the factions of the revolution have their best interests in mind. It feels extremely relevant in our current political situation. People viewing my paintings won’t be able to catch all that, nor do they need to. It’s more a way for me to structure my internal thoughts about my paintings; how they interact with architecture and its overall nihilist attitude.

LR Where does the work you will be presenting at Frieze New York fit within this evolution?

OVK I’m hoping that Frieze will be an opportunity to present my newest work! Definitely some of the drawings I’ve been making and hopefully a painting or two.

Once I install the work in a space, I’m really able to sort through it.

LR Are there any new sources of inspiration guiding your current work?

OVK I’ve been reading a lot about the history of Western set design. Set design evolved in tandem with Western perspective techniques. Both set design and Western painting have a shared goal of illusory space. A lot of European architecture reinforces these ideas around perspective. I want to take set backdrops from plays performed around the late 1700s and stretch them out like a zoetrope to ruin the spatial illusion.

LR Which part of your process are you devoting your time to in the studio right now?

OVK I’m fresh off my solo show at Château Shatto in Los Angeles, so right now I’m just starting some new paintings. Every time I finish a show or group of works, there’s at least a month or two when I’m honing in the paintings, doing tighter finishing touches rather than broad strokes. This is usually when I start to think about what’s next, start reading, researching and doing some drawings. Once I install the work in a space, I’m really able to sort through the work: what I wish I’d done differently, which ideas I’d like to take with me going forward and which I feel ready to put to rest. For example, even though the spirit of Unica Zurn’s lyrical poetry will always be an influence in my work, I feel like my last show was the perfect homage to her life, and I’m ready to put her narrative to bed.

Set design and Western painting have a shared goal of illusory space.

I'm really excited by how my screen paintings functioned in the space of the last show and I want to expand my work’s relationship to architecture. I also really liked a lot of the image-making strategies I used in the paintings Zurn and Heart and want to look towards those paintings going forward. I’m currently working on lots of drawings and I've just finished preparing canvases for the new work, which is exciting and refreshing, so we’ll see. My paintings are always a surprise, even to me.

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^{Main Image: Olivia van Kuiken, Untitled, 2024. Ink on tracing paper, 48 × 18 cm. Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles}