Katherina Olschbaur
Disrupting the myth of the woman
“Religious paintings grapple with themes that I also engage with – desire, disbelief, doubt, and sensuality.”
Katherina Olschbaur wants to flip the script on women in art. Her paintings are energetic and erotic, and also funny too. One portrait shows a sexy minotaur posing naked with stockinged legs in the air. "You need humour to be serious", she explains. Olschbaur is also obsessed with research, particularly feminist theory. But her style is mainly inspired by dead white men from European art history – she loves the work of romantic painter Francisco Goya and impressionist painter Édouard Manet. This might seem inconsistent, but it's intentional. While working with Olschbaur in 2020, the curator Al...
Katherina Olschbaur wants to flip the script on women in art. Her paintings are energetic and erotic, and also funny too. One portrait shows a sexy minotaur posing naked with stockinged legs in the air. "You need humour to be serious", she explains. Olschbaur is also obsessed with research, particularly feminist theory. But her style is mainly inspired by dead white men from European art history – she loves the work of romantic painter Francisco Goya and impressionist painter Édouard Manet. This might seem inconsistent, but it's intentional. While working with Olschbaur in 2020, the curator Allyson Unzicker summed up the ethos of her practice perfectly: “If we cannot escape patriarchy, women must challenge and subvert these roles and myths.”
In Olschbaur’s paintings, there's a sense of movement that feels like a dance. Bodies are caught mid-air and colourful brush strokes swoop across the canvas. Even though the imagery looks fast, Olschbaur paints slowly over time. Layer by layer, she adds many different ideas. She might sketch a memory from a fun night out, or even rip off a composition of an artist that she hates as a mode of rebellion and revenge. She also looks to her old sketchbooks for inspiration, as well as her personal collection of photographs and memorabilia. In her own words, “I am less interested in developing a style but more interested in finding ways to fuse all the different levels of reality".
Katherina Olschbaur (she/her) was born in 1983 in Bregenz, Austria. Since 2017, she has lived and worked in Los Angeles, USA.
Growing up in a religious family in a mountainous state in Austria, Olschbaur was taught to appreciate music, but had little contact with art. After her parents divorced when she was 4, she discovered drawing for herself as a cathartic practice. She left at 17 to Vienna where she began painting, as a means of searching for freedom and rebellion.
“A narrative grants an access point to the work. I’ve learned to memorise certain situations and certain lighting that resonates with me, and I work from there.”
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