Attempts at Otherworldliness
Chris Oliveria
Dec 13th 2025 – Feb 14th 2026
Opening event. Sat Dec 13th 7pm-11pm
Cynefin Athens is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the American, Los Angeles-based painter Chris Oliveria. This is the artist’s first presentation in Greece and his first solo exhibition in over a decade.
Across his varied career, Oliveria has created multiple bodies of work, each representing a marked departure from the last. His diverse output is informed by equally pluralistic interests in the unconscious, the rawness of early underground comix, Bay Area funk art, and gestural painting that negotiates abstraction and figuration. His work shares kinship with artists such as Sue Williams, Caroll Dunham, Willem deKooning, and John Altoon, amongst others. Oliveria grew up between Sacramento and Oakland, California. Whilst becoming a semi-pro skateboarder, he was immersed in the vibrant visual art community of the 1990s Bay Area. During this time he undertook painting classes at San Francisco City College, subsequently attending the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, earning his BFA, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 1999. Relocating to Los Angeles in 2004, his studio practice and creative enquiry have been significantly informed by the cultural ecosystems of the Los Angeles and Bay Area art scenes.
The paintings exhibited at Cynefin Athens are drawn from several bodies of work spanning the last fifteen years. A significant selection belongs to his most recent output, which has seen a return of the figure, and the incremental importance of drawing. He creates surfaces that evidence pentimento techniques, as images buried in process are unearthed and exposed in fragments, which in-turn become a foundation for new configurations. Figures and figural forms suggest themselves through iterative mark-making, rising to surfaces that undergo erasure, only to reform again – unwelcome and often perverse – in different places. Oliveria’s palette is murky, like underground thought, but over time intense colors accrete and gather momentum. These chromatic intensities are not unlike a loose hortus conclusus: gardens or enclosures that create a visual front to the muddy depths underneath. This exhibition comes at pivotal moment in Oliveria’s maturation as a visual artist, where previously divergent tendencies are interwoven with material nuance and emotional complexity.
Oliveria (b.1967. USA) has received recognition and support through prominent foundations and institutions, such as the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Can Serrat residency in Spain, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work has been exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, the Wooster Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, LACE, LAXART, and the Royal College of Art in London, amongst others. His paintings are in the collections of Cedars-Sinai and the Musee d’Art Contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, France. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
https://www.chrisoliveria.com/
IG: @chris.oliveria
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