Klein / Olson

For the last exhibition of the season, the Renaissance Society presents the work of two artists, Astrid Klein and B. Ingrid Olson.

Through a selection of their collage, sculpture, and installation works, the exhibition allows room for an encounter with the artists’ distinct practices while also drawing out affinities between them. Attentive to matters of representation, Klein and Olson stage various approaches—whether confrontational in nature or more abstract—as a means to examine ways of being in the world today.

While working with text, physical materials, or photographic images, both Olson and Klein employ strategies of collage and portraiture to animate, and at times destabilize, issues of gender and identity. In doing so, their work looks at larger power structures, value systems, and social role models.

Klein has worked across mediums since the 1970s, experimenting with materials such as neon, polyester, acetone, resin, cardboard, and film. Olson’s photographs and sculptures are provisional meditations on the fundamental and ideological properties of her own array of materials, including leather, steel, wood, velvet, and glass.

Astrid Klein lives and works in Cologne. B. Ingrid Olson lives and works in Chicago.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website