Jeremy Olson (b. 1976) is a New York–based artist working across painting, sculpture and video. His practice began as a considered exploration of geometric structure and fragmentation in portraiture. Strongly influenced by Cubism, Olson deconstructs his sitters’ faces into layered fragments and kaleidoscopic patterns, testing our mental capacity to process and decode dense fields of visual information.

While this interest in geometric structures persists through the presence of fictional architectural elements, his work has evolved into an ultra-contemporary exploration of the grotesque. Olson presents groups of characters that feel at once familiar and alien. These figures inhabit remote, itinerant and uncertain circumstances, heightened by strange and sometimes decayed environments. His compositions offer vivid visualisations of the anxieties that permeate contemporary society: dental imagery takes on a fleshy quality, while the figures resemble knots of hair that contort and twist before the viewer.