The Lobby Gallery at 499 Park Avenue presents A Tactile Nature, an exhibition of six paintings by New York-based painter Bobbie Oliver, through September 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a brochure featuring an essay by Sally Walker.
Based in the western Catskills and New York City, artist Bobbie Oliver created the paintings in this exhibition at her upstate New York studio in the depths of winter 2019. Referencing the physicality and geographic place of their fabrication, the palette of blues and greens reflect the rushing rivers and lush coniferous forests around her.
Oliver’s exploration of abstraction focuses keenly on the tactility of paint, physically manipulating it through pouring and blotting its excesses away. She alters the density of the medium by diluting it in varying degrees and pouring it on the surface with dazzling effects. Oliver challenges gravity in the way she orients the drips and movements of the paint, remaining focused and closely attuned to how it sits on the surface of the pictorial plane and sinks into the canvas.
These large-scale works draw inspiration from disparate movements and artists, including and not limited to Chinese landscape painting, Japanese calligraphy, Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, Canadian-American painter Philip Guston, and Roman frescoes. Much like her influences, Oliver’s work is concerned with the direct and gestural relationship established between the material and the artist’s hand. In this way, the presence of gesture is important as it allows one to re-examine each passage in search of the relationships in happy accidents. The trace of her hand invites audiences to make sense of the emotion and vulnerability in her process on their own terms. Oliver’s artistic practice is loose, without a preconceived plan for each paintings resolution, relying instead on improvisation and often painting on multiple canvases concurrently and pressing them against each other. They are resolved by the delicate richness in relationships, rhythms, and densities of dichotomies and variances.
Oliver’s practice is also informed by her work with other artists as both student and teacher. In the late 1970s and 80s, she worked as an assistant to the sculptor Isamu Noguchi in his Long Island City studio. Noguchi’s quietude, simple reverence for nature, and exploration of materiality inspired and reinforced her simple connection to the environment. She also worked for the minimalist composer La Monte Young, deepening the integrity and simplicity of her practice. Oliver went on to teach painting, drawing, and contemporary criticism at the Rhode Island School of Design for over 20 years, chairing the Painting Department in her last years with the college.
A committed abstractionist, Oliver’s monochromatic paintings draw immediate comparison to the color field movement pioneered by artists of the New York School in the 1950s and 60s, inviting patient contemplation of a singular hue. Together, the varying shades of blue, green, and turquoise simulate a natural world of our wildest fantasies, with skies and waterways of increasing intensity and depth. The paintings evoke feelings about the changing climate and weather evident in the water-like solvency produced through the movement of paint. Unlike the material landscape of her upstate home and studio, these contemplative color fields give way to dreams and aspirations for a better and kinder planet.
Born in Canada, Bobbie Oliver spent her twenties in London, England, moving to New York in the 1970s after ten years abroad. Her work has been exhibited extensively in North America and Europe, including over twenty solo shows and numerous group shows throughout her career. Her work is represented by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and High Noon Gallery in New York. Oliver is the recipient of many distinguished grants, including the Canada Council Grant, Ontario Arts Council, the New York State Council for the Arts and the Pollock Krasner Award. She has been awarded residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk twice and Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy
Sally Wright