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Olivia van Kuiken

The Chessboard of Bodies

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

In Bastard Rhyme, Olivia van Kuiken turns the gallery into a field of confrontation. Some canvases rise from circular bases, standing upright like bodies in the room, while others grip the walls with equal force. Together, they refuse passivity, meeting the viewer as active presences rather than objects to be looked at from a distance. For van Kuiken, painting is an event, something that presses into space and resists the familiar codes of display. The exhibition builds an environment of tension and allure, where images become architecture and architecture edges toward the psychological.

Van Kuiken’s arrival at this language was gradual. “I’ve always been interested in minimalism and the idea of painting as a kind of verbal language, a way of speaking that refuses actual spoken language and instead affects the body in an architectural sense,” she explains. At Cooper Union, she made austere monochromes, evasive works that pushed against readability, even experimenting with freestanding supports. Over time, her focus shifted toward connection, paintings people could actually stand before without being shut out. Bastard Rhyme marks that evolution: maximalist and expressive up front, yet on their reverse sides, pure voids that recall the color-field painting tradition. Both faces, she insists, reach toward “the same refusal of fixed language.”

That refusal takes form in the way the works occupy space. “In my studio, I keep paintings on the ground, upright, so they confront me bodily. I wanted to bring that into the gallery,” she notes. In the main space, the freestanding canvases dominate, spaced apart just enough to suggest both isolation and relation, like figures frozen mid-gesture. Walking among them is like moving through a strange grove of bodies, sometimes a forest, sometimes a skyline of tall buildings. Their circular bases, lifted directly from the recurring circles in the paintings, complete the transformation: each work feels like a chess piece, endowed with its own presence and logic. Together they form a kind of chessboard of bodies, an installation that pits painting against architecture, figure against field, until the room itself becomes part of the game.

Scale plays its own tricks. Untitled, 2025, a massive square-like canvas gilded and geometric, dominates the gallery, hung higher than eye level so that it bears down with an authoritarian presence. “It became a kind of controlling force,” van Kuiken recalls, “almost fascist in its severity, with the other paintings seeming to look toward it.” Hung above, it establishes a quasi-architectural axis, like an altar or stage backdrop against which the freestanding works converse. In this central space, the sculptural canvases rise to body scale, arranged so their stances seem to acknowledge the larger work, as if caught in dialogue with it. The smaller pieces in the hallway and back space offer moments of respite, alternating between tight control and loose expression, yet their positioning reinforces the hierarchy of the installation. Every shift in scale and placement unsettles orientation, reminding us that here painting is inseparable from architecture, choreography, and physical encounter.

Van Kuiken doesn’t want the show to resolve in a single glance. “I see so many shows, and they are the same when you walk into them as they are on your way out. I wanted my show to transform at every turn,” she says. Instead, Bastard Rhyme unfolds in sequence, each confrontation leading to the next. The freestanding works heighten that rhythm: their backs, expanses of red, blue, or brown fabric, become pure color fields once you pass them. Entering, you face charged imagery and sculptural stance; leaving, you meet saturated planes of austerity, almost meditative. Opposites structure the show at every turn: harsh and voluptuous, austere and excessive, controlled and abandoned, so that even the final exit pares down to restraint after sensory clash.

The works themselves convey a sense of unease through distortion. Van Kuiken mined figure-reference books once used by animators, where static bodies are redrawn from shifting perspectives. The technique reminded her of Muybridge in reverse, motion created not by movement but by a shifting gaze. From these collages emerged warped figures and busts, bodies stretched and fragmented like ruins. “These are not portraits of friends or real people,” she explains. “They are symbols, disembodied figures that open into history and abstraction.” The result is a space where the body is at once present and absent, a ghostly architecture.

Even the title carries weight. Bastard Rhyme borrows from the literary term for a slant rhyme, where sounds approach but never fully align. Van Kuiken first encountered the phrase while researching language for her work. “I loved the contrast, such an innocent concept paired with such a charged word. It felt like branding the figure,” she says. The title becomes a manifesto for the whole show: meaning emerges when elements refuse neat alignment and clash against one another.

At Matthew Brown, van Kuiken pushes painting into territory that feels physical, urgent, and unresolved. The exhibition becomes a reckoning with what painting can still do: how it can hold its own in a room full of bodies, how it can speak without words, how it can brand the air with contradiction. For a young painter, this is no small claim. Bastard Rhyme presents an artist already testing the limits of her medium with ambition and precision, unafraid to wrestle with history while demanding new forms of attention. The confrontation she sets up is real, and it leaves its mark.

Olivia van Kuiken’s “Bastard Rhyme” is on view at Matthew Brown Gallery, 390 Broadway, New York, from September 5 to October 18, 2025.