Spotlight Artist

Whitney Oldenburg

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

I am interested in how an object’s meaning can embody the unheroic, the anti-vision, and the kitsch, and how this in turn becomes the setting for polysemous propositions. I see glimpses into overlooked and unheroic objects, the “mess-ups,” as potential proper nouns, as sites or heterogeneous co-presences, and as possible exchanges of control, imbalance, repression, and hopelessness. In terms of my process, I think of my surfaces as terrains, armatures, skins, or containers. I seek to make work that inhabits the mind and physically affects the body. Attraction, repulsion, and abjection become band groupies, taste testers, and weathermen in the world in which my propositions are born.

Artist's Additional works

Works shared by the artist outside of their featured New American Paintings selections

Featured artwork
Featured artwork

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