Kaycee Olsen Gallery is pleased to announce On Recognition, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Christine Frerichs, from October 30 - December 18, 2010.

At 5:30 pm, Saturday, October 30th, the evening will commence with an intimate 20 minute Artist Talk with Christine Frerichs in conversation with Kaycee Olsen. This discussion will reveal the formal aspects of Frerichs' painting and drawing, including the themes of On Recognition, which include Frerichs' candid engagement in the process of recalling, resolving, and revising memory. The Artist Talk and reception are open to the public.

On Recognition marks Frerichs' first solo exhibition and presents a series of paintings and drawings demonstrating Frerichs' ongoing interest in repetition and memory. In these works, she playfully examines the process of recognition or 'knowing again', by extracting the visually and emotionally potent aspects of a memory - a person's flesh tone, the lavender sweater her mother wore, the particular green color of the grass in Bryant Park, New York. Using color, composition, texture and form, she then systematically reconstructs these memories with layers of interlocking paint, resulting in expressively psychological portraits, at once vulnerable and questioning.

Frerichs developed this language of pattern and portraiture through the consideration of repetition - what function repetitive behaviors might serve, and what they reveal and conceal on a psychological level.

There is a structural similarity between the construction of the paintings, through accrual of marks and colors culled from memory, and the way the psyche develops, through repetitive interactions with one's environment and responses based on past experiences. In the case of these paintings, the marks that reveal themselves on the surface, also function in partially concealing the previous layers beneath, simultaneously 'showing one's face' and hiding one's past. Her work often calls up this relationship between obstacle and desire -- layers of interrupting patterns, smudged or blurred faces - and the emotional responses associated with it, from longing or loss to humor and pleasure.

These ideas of memory and emotion materialize in the six-by-six foot painting, Two Figures in a Landscape. One figure is represented by shifting shades of repeating purple hatches, each color shift noting a different day Frerichs attempted to match a particular purple sweater from memory. The flesh color layered atop these hatches is used as a stand-in for Frerichs, who collaborated with Gamblin paint company, to create the custom color based on her own fleshtone. This color appears throughout her work, as in the head-sized painting The Approach, where a dissipated cluster of darks and lights converge to resemble a form seen only from a distance or through squinted eyes. Through distinct formal means,the paintings and drawings in On Recognition reveal Frerichs' candid engagement in the process of recalling, resolving and revising memory.