Olya Dubatova

The House of Being: searching for a perfect pigment

November 16 - December 10

Through the use of raw pigments and historical paint recipes, Olya Dubatova draws on the alchemy of painting to explore the idea of utopia and the search for wholeness.

With inspiration taken from Dubatova's personal experience and from places where she once lived, the paintings' subjects expand beyond these references. An architect of dreams, Dubatova creates tales filled with symbolic elements that give birth to multiple worlds.

By applying her paints with reverence to their materiality – and through compositions that evoke illusionary states or forgotten memories – Dubatova's paintings hold a tension that captures their viewer in an unresolved state. The viewer's experience lies in the empty space between the depicted symbols and their implied stories, where worlds of altered states and false illusions turn to a gradual deliverance from chaos.

Ultimately, Dubatova’s paintings are about the search for home, whether in time or within ourselves. Through the darkness of misunderstanding, delusions, shortcomings, and external obstacles – to the light.

OLYA DUBATOVA (born - the Soviet Union) is a Russian/American artist based in New York, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Yucatan, Mexico. Dubatova’s work has been exhibited in multiple galleries and museums internationally, including Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum Aldobrandini (Rome) Riddoch Gallery in Mount Gambier, Australia, and the Bookstore Project in Amsterdam. She co-founded and was the director of BlenderLabs at USC (Los Angeles). BlenderLabs was awarded the prestigious Visions and Voices Grant in 2016. Her projects with UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC, UCLA, and Internet Archive have been featured internationally.