Gallery 12.26

DALLAS

150 Manufacturing St. #205,
Dallas, Texas 75207
www.gallery1226.com

12.26 is a Dallas-based Contemporary Art Gallery with a focus on Emerging and Mid-career Artists. Co-founded in 2019 by sisters Hannah Fagadau and Hilary Fagadau, 12.26 was created with the intention of offering a new International perspective to the Dallas gallery landscape.

ALEX OLSON

There is a particular technique of applying paint that distinguishes Alex Olson’s work. It appears in a great many of her paintings: a squeegeed strip of colour, immaculately smooth except at its tail end where a curling crest of paint betrays where the artist lifted her tool from the canvas. The mark seems to tell us everything we could want to know about the texture of oil paint: its viscosity, its speed, its consistency – all this information is readily available on the surface. Frequently listed in her media, along with oil paint and linen, is modelling paste – indicating that the paintings are more fastidiously fabricated than their gestural surfaces might sometimes imply.

Furthermore, the ground on which they sit, which consists of an even field of brushstrokes curving in all directions (another Olson trademark, perhaps lifted from domestic wall textures of the 1970s) is uncannily tidy. Each individual hair in each brushstroke seems to have been accentuated through black dry-brushing, or under-painting, or sanding-through, in contrast to the smooth and wet-looking strips on top. This is painting to the power of itself.  - PHAIDON

Alex Olson (B. 1978, Boston, MA)  earned her Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard in 2001, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 2008. Her work has been included in Museum Exhibitions including: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angelas, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center Minneapolis, MI; and University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor, IL. Group Exhibitions include Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Altman Siegel, San Fransisco, CA; and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, UK, among others. Olson has held Solo Exhibitions at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Lisa Cooley, New York; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; and most recently a Two-Person Exhibition with Nancy Shaver for the Inaugural Exhibition of Gallery 12.26, Dallas. Olson lives and works in Los Angeles, California.