Railway Street Gallery + Studios would love to introduce the newest member of our collective -
Olivia Courtney.
Painting for Olivia Courtney is about challenging and engaging the viewer. Through paint and the action of painting, Courtney asks us to stop and read the texturally rich marks, to look for meaning in the brush strokes, to rest in blocks of colour and explore extending and overlapping lines. The rich textural quality of these works challenges us to slow down and allow the painterly visual cues to trigger memory and make connections.
'My practice is an enquiry into what painting can offer that screen based media cannot. My interests lie within the formal language of painting, using collage as a vehicle to mediate this vocabulary. Exploring tensions between memory, colour, form and paint materiality, I create idiosyncratic spaces on the canvas.'
Courtney graduated from Massey University with a post graduate degree in Fine Arts with First class honours. She has relocated from Wellington to north of Auckland and works from her studio in Matakana. She is a member of the Railway Street Gallery collective of Artists.
She has an upcoming show in July with fellow artist Maria Owens. We are very excited about the future of Olivia Courtneys art practice and we invite you to be part of her journey.