Olive Madora Ayhens (born 1943), is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She first gained recognition in California in the 1970s for stylized figurative work, but is most known for the fantastical, dizzying cityscapes, landscapes and interiors, often depicting New York City, that she has painted since the mid-1990s. These works intermingle the urban and pastoral, and inside and outside, employing absurd juxtapositions, improbabilities of scale and vibrant colors, in pointed but playful explorations of the clash between civilization and nature. New York Sun critic David Cohen has described her images as "poised between the lyrical and the apocalyptic. They capture both the poetry and the politics of the densely populated, literally and metaphorically stratified, used and abused city."
Ayhens has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Joan Mitchell, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb and Pollock-Krasner foundations. She has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), American Academy of Arts & Letters, Roswell Museum, and New York State Museum. Her work belongs to the public collections of MTA Arts & Design in New York, the Oakland Museum of California and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.
Early life and career
Olive Madora Ayhens was born in 1943 and raised in Oakland, California. She decided to become an artist at age 18 and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where she earned BFA and MFA degrees (1968, 1969), while producing figurative work influenced by Pre-Columbian art, early modernists and Abstract Expressionism.
Ayhens was active among a group of female Bay Area artists in the early 1970s (among them, Judith Linhares and M. Louise Stanley), 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. 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, and had solo exhibitions at the SFAI (1972), SFMOMA Artist Gallery (1989) and Michael Himovits Gallery (1991–94), among other venues.
In 1996, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio grant prompted Ayhens's move to New York City. The change directed her subject matter toward cityscapes, the collision of natural and urban, and ecological concerns. A subsequent Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views residency providing 91st-floor studio space in the World Trade Center shifted her work further, towards bird's-eye-view panoramas that she likened to studying an organism under a microscope. In her later career, Ayhens has had solo exhibitions at Gary Tatintsian Gallery (2002–03), Mid-Manhattan Public Library (2007), Frederieke Taylor Gallery (2007¬–09) and Bookstein Projects (2012–19), all in New York, and at the Roswell Museum (2015). Her work has also been featured in Harper's Magazine since 2001.
Work and reception
Ayhens's work is inspired by her physical environment—places lived in or traveled to—and in that way, has been described as almost biographical. She works from on-site sketches, collected imagery, memory, and ultimately, imagination, yet according to Hyperallergic'''s Stephen Maine, remains grounded in a "willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction." Her packed compositions fuse contradictory and imaginary realms into "jumbled panoramas" that have been described as "urban visionary," expressionist, folk-like, raucous and "both apocalyptic and joyous." Critics have compared her art to that of well-known cityscape artists Rackstraw Downes and Yvonne Jacquette, Hieronymus Bosch and expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and George Grosz.
Ayhens presents catastrophic environmental allegories that she offsets with a loose painting style employing saturated, hues, unexpected juxtapositions, and a warped sense of space. The New Yorkers Andrea K. Scott suggested Ayhens's work was what might result "if modernist Florine Stettheimer had crossed paths with Greta Thunberg": colorful, kaleidoscopic composite paintings addressing climate change in which "whimsy tends to outstrip dread." Stephen Maine suggests that a central, animating paradox of Ayhens's work is a contradiction between its profusion of eccentric pictorial detail and its ambiguous intent which encompasses "cultural symbol, narrative device, autobiographical marker, or just the fun of paint."Mount, Ferdinand. "Aprés Brexit," Lettre International, May/June 2020.