Artist

Olympia Scarry

Lives in New York

Olympia Scarry, portrait
Olympia Scarry, portrait

Olympia Scarry (1983) is a Swiss American artist working with sculpture. Her fascination with materiality is a constant driving force in her work. Her choices reflect the ambiguities of power as they are transferred through thought and substance. Between fragility and strength, protection and vulnerability. Gravity and decay also play a role in rendering solid forms, formless, in states of flux; caught as they are between weight and weightlessness, the urge to purify and record the material memory of time. As In Saliva (2014), a solid form of soap evolving with time retaining only the markings and memory of toxins; Say It As It Lays (2019) that turns solid matter into liquid state (the finest chain mail onyx metal which evokes liquid metal seeping through the floors) or Aluminum 98% (2019), a series of abstract drawings created with pulverized micronanons of aluminium, copper, and steel powder. Scarry diagrams possibility while at the same time withholding the very point of view that such possibility typically provides, we are asked by the artist to look at the thing that we typically look through. In Parallel Lines Meet At The Point of Inifinity (2019), borosilicate glass rods are activated by natural light beams and artificial exposure on a constantly evolving exchange.
Scarry creates drawings with crushed glass and erases them through the process, leaving only the markings of what
could have been; a result of alchemy of transformation as in the diptych The Son of Man 2018 and Eleven/Eleven 2018 a 5 meter by 5 meter permanent installation in New York City comprising of 22 glass windows. Scarry’s work
reverberates through materiality deconstructing architectural forms and recontextualizing them, pushing the material to transform into other. Her works continue an exploration of traces while considering site specificity through the subtleties of time. And so Scarry strips the protections of ideals and body away to reveal beneath the security blanket of our own constructions a delicate and febrile world of material form. The connection between the exterior and interior is shattered, as in “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”, 2014, a proposed structure of a house never to be built. Solo exhibitions of Scarry’s work were recently held at Hauser & Wirth, Seeing Things As They Are 2018 in Gstaad and at Apalazzo, Parallel Lines Meet At The Point of Infinity 2019 in Brescia. Group exhibitions include The Barbican in London, and the Venice Biennale collateral and a first permanent site-specific outdoor commission at Eleven Madison Park in NYC. Olympia Scarry received her BFA from American University in Paris in Social Psychology and her MFA in Studio Art at NYU and Curatorial Studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in NYC.

Exhibitions
Exhibitions
Olympia Scarry: White Noise
ICA Milan presents White Noise, a solo exhibition by Olympia Scarry. Scarry’s sculptural works...
18 Jan 2022 - 06 Mar 2022
ICA Milano
Milan
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