October 19 — November 30, 2019
On Some Faraway Beach
Angel Oloshove
Upon moving to Houston in 2012, Angel Oloshove simultaneously encountered the large colorfully gradient Texas skies and the academic holdings of Surrealist objects in the Menil Collection’s Witness exhibition. In particular, the bifurcated coconuts indigenous to just one island in the Maldives, the Coco De Mer. Both would reinforce existing interest in Oloshove’s work and become a driver for future works as well. The chromatic variations of the Texas sky at dusk and dawn mirror Oloshove’s airbrushed gradients and the robust seeds of the Coco De Mer resembled Oloshove’s past work both of which have been described as anthropomorphic in form with the Coco De Mer acquiring not only mythic status but a legacy of its resemblance to a woman’s hips and buttocks.
Within the intimate setting of the gallery’s Project Room, Oloshove will build an immersive installation conjuring the viewer’s experience of encountering a kind of divine feminine escape room and walking amidst pink sand beaches, discovering the voluptuous sculptural forms reminiscent of the Coco De Mer and the radiant sky nestled along the shore.
Angel Oloshove studied painting at California College of the Arts. She worked in graphic design and toy development in Tokyo for six years before returning to the US and most recently settling in Houston, Texas.
Her work often experiments with painterly glazes to express transcendental experiences through color, form and texture. She has balanced a fine art practice of sculptural ceramics as well has her own line of functional design pottery stocked in design boutiques throughout the United States. In 2017, her studio practice expanded into painting and printmaking culminating in an editioned artist book published by Aventures LTD Press.
Her exhibition Floating Worlds at Art Palace Gallery in Houston was selected as a Critic’s Pick for the April 2015 issue of ArtForum. In 2015, she was named one of “Ten Modern Ceramists Shaping the Future” by AnOther Magazine. In July 2018, she was featured in Monthly Ceramic Magazine in Korea and was a contribution author to LULA JAPAN magazine that same month. Angel’s ceramic designs and artworks were shown at the inaugural Texas Design Now at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In 2017, she was invited to have a solo exhibition at the Elizabet Ney Museum (Austin, TX).
She was a finalist for the 2015 and 2018 Houston Artadia Award, was a nominee for the 2016 and 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and is a former resident artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the American Craft Council Emerging Artist Award.
Read the Arts + Culture TX Magazine feature on Angel Oloshove here.