Between Us

Curated by Diana Nawi

February 7 – October 27, 2024
Wednesday – Sunday
11AM – 6PM

Between Us is the inaugural presentation of the Olivia Foundation drawn from the Olivia collection, which includes a substantial focus on abstraction by women artists, Between Us presents works that engage in intergenerational dialogues as well as a selection of individual practices in-depth. Across the exhibition, abstraction is intertwined with nuanced, personal figuration and moodily imagined landscapes, undoing the bounds between genres throughout the galleries and within single works.

Situated in the intimate architecture of this historic building —originally built as a residence in the early 1900s and reimagined by Alberto Kalach and Carlos Zedillo—Between Us highlights shared formal languages that emphasize the gestural and evocative possibilities of painting across generations and contexts. Artworks on view span the second half of the twentieth century through the present; works by Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner provide historical and conceptual grounding for the collection, while the Artist Spotlight features a 2024 painting commissioned from Sophia Loeb.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor with abstract gestural paintings by Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, Joan Mitchell, and Mary Weatherford, among others, that viscerally index the artists’ hand alongside a smaller selection of dense, meditative works by artists including Victoria Gitman and Shio Kusaka. Ascending the galleries, figurative paintings and prints that conjure psychic spaces and bodily memories emerge with major works by Rita Ackermann, Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin.

The top two floors explore the formal relationship between artists whose works evade allusion to image and representation and those who use abstraction to depict the landscape as both an observed place and interior state. Artists including Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Mimi Lauter, and Chris Ofili reflect the natural world as ephemeral and psychically charged. Throughout the exhibition, we witness abstraction as a mode of personal expression, a reflection of the sublime and the spiritual, and a vehicle for re-envisioning and recreating the world around us. 

Between Us invites the viewer into each space as if we are stepping into an intimate conversation, reflecting the collaboration that has built the collection, and the dialogues each artist continually has with the history of painting and art, with their peers and predecessors, and now, with us.

Featured Artists

Rita Ackermann, Kelly Akashi, Ruth Asawa, Louise Bourgeois, Carol Bove, Cecily Brown, Lucy Bull, Tracey Emin, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Marley Freeman, Ellen Gallagher, Victoria Gitman, Adolph Gottlieb, Roni Horn, Shara Hughes, Jacqueline Humphries, Luchita Hurtado, Lee Krasner, Shio Kusaka, Yayoi Kusama, Mimi Lauter, Sophia Loeb, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Jorge Pardo, Howardena Pindell, Avery Singer, Mary Weatherford, Charline von Heyl, Jack Whitten, Faith Wilding.