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First Take: Jacco Olivier

Presented by Blaffer Gallery - University of Houston at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston

May 13-August 7, 2010

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May, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston presents an exhibition featuring Dutch artist Jacco Olivier, whose presentation of ten works inaugurates Blaffer's new "First Take" series. The exhibition is on view at the museum from May 14 through Aug. 7, 2010. Visitors are encouraged to attend a free opening reception on Thursday, May 13, from 6 until 8 p.m. Admission is free, and refreshments will be provided. Blaffer is located in the Fine Arts Building on the central campus of the University of Houston.

Olivier's luscious filmic vignettes are quiet meditations on painting set in motion. Technically, his work falls into the category of animation. Images are repeatedly reworked and rephotographed to create a narrative that unfolds through a camera-driven progression. Olivier likes to tell a story, but even in his most anecdotal works, the most interesting tale is the story of painting itself.

For each work, Olivier repaints the same canvas over and over again, carefully photographing each stage of development. In time the original image slowly degenerates and finally disappears altogether in the cumulative layers of paint. The final work, the photographic record, thus becomes an animated history of a painting, a slice of time that captures scraps of narrative and memories, and joins them together to form a moving picture with an atmospheric charge enriched by an ambient soundtrack.

Hunger, Birds, Submerge, all 2003, and Hide, 2004, delve into the animal realm. The viewer follows a polar bear across snowy plains on his hunt for fish, soars into the sky with a flock of birds, dives into the deep sea, or catches glimpses of a frog alternatively jumping and hiding in a grassy field. Other works, such as Sleep and Normandy, both 2004, serve as meditative windows onto simple moments of daily life: one shows a woman tossing and turning in bed, while in the other she enjoys the breeze on the seashore. In his more recent work, including Bath, 2009, Portrait, 2009, and Transition, 2010, Olivier has mined traditional genres, such landscapes and still lifes, bathers and portraits, often pushing the image to the edge of abstraction. With the new focus on painting as a historical discipline has come a shift in scale that emphasizes the viewer's relationship to the painting as an object. Where Olivier's early films read like intimate, jewel-like visual poems, the new ones add a surprisingly expansive spatial and physical dimension to an otherwise largely immaterial experience of sight and sound.

First Take, Olivier's first solo museum exhibition, brings together ten works created between 2003 and 2010. The artist was born in the Netherlands in 1972. He graduated from the Rijksakademie in 1998, and lives and works in Amsterdam.

First Take: Jacco Olivier is on view concurrently with Tomás Saraceno: Lighter than Air.

Schedule of Events:

6 - 8 p.m. Thursday, May 13
Opening Reception

12 p.m. Wednesday, June 16
Brown Bag Gallery Tour

About Blaffer: Founded in 1973, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston was named in honor of the late Sarah Campbell Blaffer, a noted Houston arts patron and collector. Since its inception, the museum has been a vital force in the presentation and promotion of contemporary visual arts in Houston. Blaffer is located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston's central campus, entrance 16 off Cullen Boulevard. It is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Sundays, Mondays and university holidays. The museum is ADA compliant. For general inquiries, please call 713.743.9521, or visit the museum online at www.blafferartmuseum.org. 

First Take: Jacco Olivier is organized by Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by The Cecil Amelia Blaffer von Furstenberg Endowment for Exhibitions and Programs and Houston Endowment Inc.

Blaffer exhibitions and programs are supported by the Blaffer Director's Discretionary Endowment Fund, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, The George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. Educational outreach programs are made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additional educational support is provided by Dorothy C. Sumner, the Travelers Foundation, and the Kinder Morgan Foundation. Staff salaries are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act..