Miart, 2024

CHROMA

Heather Benjamin | Anna Berlin | Dana Frankfort | Kathleen Goncharov | Lee Maxey | Cassandra Mayela | Naomi Nakazato | Kako Ueda | Mie Yim

Booth #C66

April 12 - 14, 2024

Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3
viale Scarampo, Milan

View Works

Olympia is pleased to present CHROMA, our participation in miart 2024, with new works by Heather Benjamin, Anna Berlin, Dana Frankfort, Kathleen Goncharov, Lee Maxey, Cassandra Mayela, Naomi Nakazato, Kako Ueda, and Mie Yim. 

Until the Industrial Revolution, artists were limited in their access to color, both because of costs and geographic inability to acquire a range of pigments. Humans have gone through life threatening and ecologically damaging lengths to brighten up their world – crushing scale insects to produce red pigments, extracting the flesh of shellfish to create phthalo green, grinding lapis lazuli stone to mix ultramarine blue, combining animal urine with lead to produce cadmium yellow. Many of these results were poisonous, prone to discoloration, and harmful to the world artists sought to describe. 

Today, a limited palette is often used to accentuate composition, harmony, and impact ineffably in their work. CHROMA highlights an array of works across a range of mediums, which employ either a monochromatic or limited palette. The prismatic spectrum of works included provide insight to each artists’ process of applying color restrictions. By having a focal hue, the visual space to explore proliferates. 

Heather Benjamin’s exploration of the silhouetted female body is built upon her practice of creating diaristic, psychedelic environments. Anna Berlin’s silver-black Florine Stettheimer transcriptions turn into formal considerations of sisterhood, encapsulating linguistic and personal meanings. Abstraction and words commingle in Dana Frankfort’s paintings, so that the surfaces are as much read as they are read into. Kathleen Goncharov’s gray-blue and orange-sienna survey unpopulated and purely imagined terrains, an interior mappae mundi decades in the making. 

Lee Maxey’s dramatic shifts of purples and reds dart across the wall of an interior space–  flashes of car lights appear like a meteor shower in the night sky.  Cassandra Mayela’s yellow and pink, black and white, create grids out of warps and woofs– the 20th century symbol of modernism met with the loom, one of the oldest technologies. Naomi Nakazato’s silver and yellow connect to the artifice and hybrid nature of contemporary cultural language, while looking for a personal one. 

Kako Ueda’s earth or sky tones are paper-cut outs that are part animal, flower, and insect; they are fantastical whose identities are only partially revealed. Mie Yim creates colorfields of a playfully profane sexuality; characterized by grotesque anthropomorphism and anatomical, sometimes pornographic, contours.

The artistic languages in CHROMA reveal how varied and subjective the experience of color is in our lives – shifting in its cultural significance, and redefined time and time again.

Heather Benjamin received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016). NADA Miami (Miami, Florida 2023) marked Benjamin’s debut art fair participation as well as her first presentation with Olympia. Selected solo exhibitions include: Bim Bam Gallery (Paris, France, 2023); New Image Art (Los Angeles, 2021); the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 2020); Underdogs (Lisbon, Portugal, 2020); Commune (Tokyo, Japan, 2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Jeffrey Deitch (Los Angeles, California, 2020); Andrew Edlin (New York, NY, 2018); Over The Influence (Hong Kong, 2021) among others. Benjamin has also been self-publishing zines and artist books of her work since 2008. She lives and works in New York City. 

Anna Berlin is a painter living and working in Berlin, Germany. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College (2015) and her MFA from Boston University (2020). Anna received a Fulbright Scholarship for painting to The Universität der Künste Berlin (2021-2022). She has been a resident at the Visual Arts at Chautauqua (Chautauqua, NY, 2017), and the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont, 2015). Recent exhibitions include: Olympia (New York, NY, 2023); Föll, Universität der Künste (Berlin, German, 2021); SPRING/BREAK Art Fair (New York, NY, 2020); Vacation Gallery (New York, NY, 2019); The Painting Center (New York, NY, 2019). 

Dana Frankfort is a painter based in Houston, Texas. She has attended residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, Ox-Bow, and the MFAH Core Studio Art Program. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and others. Frankfort has been a recipient of an Artadia grant as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Frankfort’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX); Rice University, (Houston, TX); St. Edward's University (Austin, TX); and The Jewish Museum (New York, NY). She received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Yale University. Frankfort’s debut Olympia solo exhibition took place in the winter of 2024 and was featured in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Kathleen Goncharov is Senior Curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. She served as US Commissioner to the 50th Venice Biennale where she curated an exhibition by Fred Wilson for the American pavilion. She has also organized international exhibitions in Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Bologna, Venice, and Rome, as well as numerous exhibitions and projects in the United States. For fourteen years she served as Curator of the University Art Collection at The New School in New York City where she built a major art collection and organized public programs for the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. For the last 40 years, in tandem with her passionate curatorial career, Goncharov has also worked as an artist. Until the fall of 2022, this was not widely known. Goncharov’s debut solo exhibition, Above and Below, was held at Olympia (New York, NY, 2022). The exhibition was highlighted in Artforum and Art Plugged. 

Lee Maxey received her MFA from Boston University (2016) and her BFA from the University of Central Arkansas (2011). Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include: Olympia (Solo, New York, NY, 2024, 2021); 12.26 Gallery (Solo, Dallas, TX, 2023); Yutaka Kikutake Gallery (Two-person, Tokyo, JPN, 2023); the artist-run space Hercules Art/Studio Program, (Solo, New York, NY, 2019). Recent group shows include Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles, CA, 2024); Marathon Gallery, (Ellenville, NY, 2023); Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, ME, 2021); The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division (New York, NY, 2019). Forthcoming projects include: miart, (Group, Milan, ITA, 2024); Deanna Evans Project (Group, New York, NY, 2024); and artist-residency culminating in an exhibition at NARANJO 131 (Group, Mexico City, MEX, 2024-25).

A solo presentation of Lee's work at NADA Miami (Miami, FL, 2022) was selected for the Curated Spotlight by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels. Maxey was an Artist in Residence at the Hercules Studio/Art Program (New York, NY, 2019) and at the Fire Island Artist Residency (Fire Island, NY, 2018). Maxey lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and teaches painting at Brooklyn College.

Cassandra Mayela has lived and worked in New York since 2014, when she was forced to migrate from Venezuela. Cassandra Mayela is a self-taught artist. Her practice delves into identity, migration, and belonging, drawing from personal experiences, research and conversations. Recent solo exhibitions include: JO-HS (Mexico City, Mexico, 2023); NADA House (New York, NY, 2022); Olympia, (New York, NY, 2021). Group exhibitions include: V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2024); Apexart (New York, NY, 2024) Olympia (New York, NY, 2023); EFA Project Space (New York, NY, 2023); Acompi and NARS Foundation (New York, NY, 2021). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, and Vogue Mexico. 

Naomi Nakazato is a Japanese-American, multidisciplinary artist whose predominately materials-based practice surveys the conglomerate landscape of memory, language, and the artificial authenticity of the biracial experience. Her work utilizes the semiotics and syntactic intervention of natural objects to examine the weight of authenticity and the yearning to articulate a simultaneously close and unfamiliar self. Nakazato holds a BA in Painting and Drawing from the South Carolina School of the Arts (2014) and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art (2018).Selected exhibitions include: Zona Maco, presented by Olympia (Mexico City, Mexico, 2023); Charles Moffett (New York, NY, 2023); LVL3 (Chicago, Illinois, 2022); Below Grand (New York, NY, 2022); Olympia (New York, NY, 2022); Galerie Tracanelli (Grenoble, France, 2021) among others. She is the recent recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2020); FST Studio Projects Funds (2019), and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2017, 2016). Nakazato lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Kako Ueda left her native country Japan to move to the United States as a teenager to pursue a creative life. Her work has been exhibited at: Olympia (New York, NY, 2023); University of Wisconsin (Madison, WA, 2010); the Museum of Art and Design (New York, NY, 2010); Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland, 2009); DeCordova Museum (Boston, MA, 2009) among others. She is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts grant.

Mie Yim, born in South Korea, is a New York City based painter. Solo exhibitions include: Olympia (New York, NY, 2023, 2021); Simone Subal Gallery (New York, NY, 2023); Inna Art Space (Hangzhou, China, 2023); Villa Magdalena (San Sebastian, Spain, 2022); the Durst foundation (New York, NY). She has had museum exhibitions at Pace University (New York, NY, 2024) and Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT, 2022). Group exhibitions include: Lehmann Maupin (Seoul, South Korea, 2024); Jessica Silverman (San Francisco, CA, 2023); Canada Gallery (New York, NY, 2022); Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta, GA, 2022). She is a recipient of Sharp Walentas Studio Program (2023-2024), The New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellowship (2021), Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020). She has a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art (1986).