Let’s Go for a Drive, 2024
Oil on canvas on panel
50” x 42”
New Paintings by Emily Olszewski
ABATTOIR @ The Quarter
2615 Detroit Ave, Hingetown, Ohio City
November 16th, 2024 - March 15th, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, November 16th 6 - 8pm
Abattoir is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Emily Olszewski at our Hingetown location, Abattoir at The Quarter. Olszewski’s paintings depict scenes of young women together in settings specific enough to seem familiar to residents of Northeast Ohio, while still providing a general backdrop for the artist’s tales of nighttime escapades. The works are unusual amalgamations of friends and acquaintances in the Akron area, all cavorting in scenes of drinking, parading, and sharing confidences.
Born and raised in Akron, Emily Olszewski paints psychological portraits in settings that may be read most directly by a certain group—her friends-- embellished with signifiers addressing that group. The artist’s personal world expands however in these pictures, taking the hyperlocal into a larger emotional realm that speaks to larger topics: female bonding in a fraught social moment, youth facing an uncertain moment in civil society, self-reflection against a turbulent landscape. Olszewski is part of a generation of contemporary figurative painters investigating identity, gender, and class in the 21st century. Drawing inspiration from her personal relationships, she serves up situations that give viewers a glimpse into spaces reserved for the friends who inhabit them, creating enchanting scenes that telegraph humor, sensuous intimacy, as well as danger and unease.
Olszewski employs many techniques to raise her work from the incidental to the universal. Her oil paintings are large, ambitious compositions in which large-scale figures strut heroically in nocturnal landscapes all bathed in artificial light, both interior and exterior scenes. One might reflect on the emotional drama of the Baroque, or more recent predecessors in the New German Expressionism of the 1980s. Larger than life young women are protagonists, bound by other-worldly electric tones of violet, fuchsia, and royal blue conveying a tense atmosphere throughout the show.
Emily Olszewski is a figurative painter based in Akron, Ohio, whose work draws from pop culture and themes of feminine communication and community. She earned her BFA in painting from The University of Akron in 2019, and her MFA from Kent State University in 2024. She has exhibited widely in the Akron and Cleveland, and recently participated in the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York.