Olga Tobreluts

New Abilities

February 28th through April 25th, 2015

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 28th, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present New Abilities, the second solo-exhibition of multimedia works by Russian artist, Olga Tobreluts. New Abilities explores adaptive evolution in human visual perception in the 21st century and offers new forms of visual expression that discuss the simulation of reality and “realness” in our advanced technological age. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 28th, with a reception for the artist from 6:00 pm until 9:00 pm.

Technological progress and the gradual substitution of innate human ability with artificial intelligence have lead to a change in human perception of environment. The act of absorbing information filtered without discretion and void of meaningful or truly relevant context lends itself to a new condition in which individuals, on our age of hyperconnectivity, find themselves over stimulated, especially visually, yet in a state of ironic segregation and isolation: unconnected.

Human adaptation to this new modern condition suggests that the human brain is quickly evolving, acquiring new functions in response to a fragmentary perception of reality. An overabundance of status updates, commercials, and information bits from the internet and the world of mass media facilitates the emergence of new visual abilities in humankind, as a new kind of survival tactic, as we begin to see and internalize the visual and informational worlds differently than those who lived before the 21st century.

Of the works presented in New Abilities, Tobreluts writes:

“My new project is dedicated to the examination of new human abilities of visual perception through well-known works from of the old masters which are based on fantasy and colorful reminiscences.

When the whole image is divided into fragments and then recomposed again, it does not let our memory reconstruct the image to completion, but does reward us with the feeling of recognition of the familiar ”

Born in 1970 in Murino, Leningrad Oblast, Russia, Olga Tobreluts now lives in St. Petersburg and also has studios in Berlin, Germany and San Tagliamento, Italy. An accomplished artist who works with photography, video, painting and sculpture, Olga is a pioneer of digital art movement in Russia and has belonged to the Neo-Academism group of artists, The New Academy, in St. Petersburg since 1994. This movement, through traditionally pleasant and refined aesthetics, addresses ideas of the “beautiful” the acquiescent-recreative and hedonism. Olga uses new media as a means of expressing her own system of poetics based on the dialectics of high and low academism: where the artist endeavors to strike a balance between high-style classical models and low-brow, kitschy, and crude models.

Olga has had numerous solo museum exhibitions through out the world, including in Belgium, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland and has shown with American favorites like Tony Oursler and Cindy Sherman at the Tate Modern, as well as countless other well known international artists. Her works have also been exhibited at such prestigious institutions as the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, as well as at the Ostende Museum in Belgium and the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm, among numerous others. Her works have been acquired by significant collections including at the MoMA, NY, the State Russian Museum, the Ludwig Musuem, the Baron von Stieglitz Museum, the Mario Testino Foundation, and the Wolfgang Joop Foundation.

Two comprehensive books written on her work and have also been featured in most major international contemporary arts publications and her work has been included in such publications as Art Actuel, Flash Art, ArtReview, METROPOLISM, ART, and FOCUS. Her work as also been featured in premiere fashion publications such as W Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue Paris, Vogue Russia, and Vogue Germany and V Magazine.

In 2012 alone Olga had solo exhibitions Paris and St Petersburg, and in Italy, in addition to a five floor retrospective called The New Mythology at the MOMA Moscow. In 2013, The New Mythology toured and was hosted in Yekaterinburg, Russia; Rome, Italy; and Berlin, Germany. Her work was exhibited for the first time at Deborah Colton Gallery during the 2012 FotoFest Biennial in a solo exhibition, Focus on Russia I and has also been featured in art fairs nationwide. Olga Tobreluts is represented by Deborah Colton Gallery throughout the United States.

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists worldwide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations. The gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change.