NEW YORK, NY.- Mad. Sq. Art announces an outdoor exhibition of six painterly animations by acclaimed Dutch artist Jacco Olivier as the final presentation of its 2011 season. Mad. Sq. Art celebrates the artist’s first public art commission in New York City, which will feature both new, site-specific and existing works displayed throughout the Park. Olivier’s series of stop-motion animations will brighten New York’s winter landscape with moving images exemplary of the artist’s characteristically rich color palette and lavishly textured style. The exhibition will remain on view daily in Madison Square Park from December 15, 2011 through March 12, 2012.
Beginning with a single image, Olivier introduces subtle alterations with each additional layer through his process of over-painting. After he paints and re-paints his images, Olivier photographs each stage of the process as stop-motion animation until an original no longer exists. The resulting work reveals a history of the painting process that captures scraps of narrative and visual iconography brought to light as a moving painting.
According to the artist, Jacco Olivier, exhibiting in Madison Square Park provides “an opportunity to go totally abstract and see things on a molecular level, to change perspective[…] to show an animation in the ground, you really have to look down to see it, which creates a little private moment for the viewer that is free of narrative, subject or meaning.”
President of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, Debbie Landau comments, “Mad. Sq. Art is pleased to bring Jacco Olivier and his richly colorful work to Madison Square Park. The subtle yet engaging quality of his animations will infuse an appreciated energy into the Park during the winter months ahead, drawing connections between scenes of natural landscape in his beautiful, painterly animations and the natural life of the Park that so commonly lays hidden beneath the snow each winter.”
Olivier’s exhibition for Madison Square Park will feature a combination of his larger and more intimate works including: Stumble (2009); Hide (2004); Rabbit Hole (2011); Bird (2011); Deer (2011); and Home (2004). Animations will be displayed on screens imbedded in and suspended throughout the Park’s existing landscape, equally animating life in the Park’s heavily trafficked and quieter spaces. Olivier’s moving images of flora and fauna are set to artfully draw parallels to their natural accompaniments in Madison Square Park for its 50,000 daily visitors.
In connection with the exhibition, Mad. Sq. Art will publish a limited-edition exhibition catalogue designed by Pentagram, featuring a scholarly essay about Olivier’s new work along with full-color photographs by acclaimed photographer James Ewing. The publication will mark the first time Mad. Sq. Art has documented a moving-image project with a printed catalogue.
Dutch artist Jacco Olivier (b. 1972) studied at the Rijksakademie, and lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2010 he had solo exhibitions at the Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos, Spain, and at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, Texas. He was included in exhibitions at the MCA Denver (2006), ZKM, Museum fur Neue Kunst & Medienmuseum, Karlsruhe (2007) and in the 8th SITE Santa Fe Biennial: The Dissolve, curated by Daniel Belasco and Sarah Lewis (2010). In 2012, Olivier will participate in a residency program at Artspace in San Antonio, Texas. Jacco Olivier is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; and Parra & Romero Galeria de Arte, Madrid; and Ron Mandos Gallery in Amsterdam. His exhibition in Madison Square Park is Olivier’s New York public art debut.
