About
Rebecca Olsen, President and CEO of the Santa Reparata International School of Art (SRISA), was born in Italy and raised between Texas and Florence. She moved permanently to Florence in 1999, where she began her professional career as the studio manager of the Santa Reparata Graphic Arts Center. Soon afterward, she re-founded the school with Dennis Olsen (her father) and Meredith Dean, renaming it SRISA, assuring its place as one of the most prestigious art schools in Florence. Olsen served as the Director for 23 years before moving into her current role as President in January 2022. In addition to her leadership at SRISA, Rebecca Olsen is a visual artist known for her unique wearable art. She regularly exhibits her work internationally, with representation from the Whitegrid Gallery in Berlin. Her handmade wearable art is also featured in the Whitney Museum shop.
Through layering of imagery, surface, texture, and meaning; Olsen build systems that both create and collapse coherence; echoing the unstable architectures of thought while finding balance within the chaos. It is about revealing and resisting; oppressors, language, arbitrary rules; it’s about tension; the anxiety of uncertainty; the awareness of impermanence; the vastness of infinity; it’s beautiful, but it’s not about beauty; until it is. Her work is rooted in a formal language that is intuitive; like an algorithm running beneath the surface; providing balance and structure while allowing her to expand, contract, and move fluidly across media; Olsen’s work cannot be define by a single style or medium; but by a method; a process; a signature.
Artist Statement
As a multi-media artist my work is abstract with a strong relationship to geometry. Mark-making and line are generally more important to me than color and I typically use a restrained color pallet. I draw my inspiration from the urban city. As a subject, the city intrigues me; both as a symbol of man’s potential but also of the endless development that may ultimately overrun the earth.
Many of my images can be interpreted as seen through a telephoto lens that is drawing in and out upon an urban landscape. In some works, you may see the detail of a wall, or the wall itself. In others, the city skyline, or building, drawing further away, the city becomes a map. The images are never of one city in particular but of the idea of a city, the images are always highly abstracted suggesting rather than illustrating. The lines that make up the images are always from numerous perspectives, pushing against strict representation and creating the image in blocks of color and line.
The purely abstract images, of which there are many in my work, relate to the walls of the city and its lines, shadows and textures. I have been archiving and cataloging photographically the walls of the city (Florence) for nearly 10 years and they have heavy influenced the mark making as well as the surface of the canvas. In my more recent work I have been interested in representing many perspectives of the city in one image, much like the eye and brain gather many images and information to form an snap shot of reality, so too I wish to translate these images to form a sense of the “city” and city-ness.
The process of editing, re-editing and layering images and ideas is foremost to my process. If I am working in drawing, painting or printmaking, I am thinking of how to transpose layers, and how those layers can be perceptible, providing depth spatially but also historically to how the work was made. Experimentation and chance are an important part of my process. I approach each work as though it is a problem to be solved. Working both with spontaneity and chance, I prefer not to overly plan my end result but to work until the painting, drawing or print reveals itself and is finished.
