Oli Sihvonen & Signe Stuart: After The Responsive Eye

Pie Projects Contemporary Art is delighted to present the exhibition Oli Sihvonen and Signe Stuart: After the Responsive Eye . The exhibition will showcase recent paintings on hand-sewn canvas by Signe Stuart alongside oil paintings from the late 1960s by Oli Sihvonen (1921–1991).

In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened The Responsive Eye, the first survey of Op Art (Optical Art), a new form of abstraction that played with the viewer’s visual perception. Organized by MoMa’s curator William C. Seitz, the exhibition showcased the work of over 100 artists, including Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, and Oli Sihvonen, among others. 

After attending a seminar with Ad Reinhardt, artist Signe Stuart went to see the The Responsive Eye at MoMa. The exhibition expanded her vision, especially in regards to reductive compositions and subtle color contrast. She was particularly struck by the work of Oli Sihvonen and soon after, she and her husband visited him at his studio in Taos.

Oli Sihvonen’s paintings focus on the interaction of geometric shapes, surfaces and the adjacency of color. For Sihvonen, who studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College before arriving in Taos in the mid-1950s on a Wurlitzer Foundation fellowship, his years in New Mexico were formative. There, he developed a body of optical abstractions grounded in the clarity of light and the rhythm of repetition. 

For Stuart, the perceptual remains central to her six decades of art-making. Like Sihvonen, she uses color, light, and rhythm to generate subjective experiences brought about by simultaneous contrast and spacial illusion. In her new work—which includes a suite of five hand-sewn paintings titled In The Beginning—transparent gradations of color seem to appear or disappear, while colored edges and emerging lines/shapes folding over a lower edge extend the painting’s content beyond the frame.