Jeff Overlie: Glitch://Life
The gallery is pleased to present Glitch://Life, Jeff Overlie’s first solo exhibition at Marc Straus, featuring new paintings and sculptures. The works are divided into two series of abstract paintings and two series of steel sculptures.
The first painting series, Blackberry Horizons, is based on digital glitches from a faulty phone camera taken fifteen years ago. Bands of color stretch and dissolve, colors shift unexpectedly, and fragments of lines hover on the edge of recognition. Overlie digitally blew up these images and carefully traced them by hand, staying true to the imperfect output of a device. These images are glitchy, often unrecognizable, and unfit for use. And yet, Overlie chose to embrace these ‘flawed’ results and use them to inform his artistic practice of abstract painting. What could be dismissed as an error instead becomes a defining element of Overlie’s artistic process. In BH-00190-1824, what might have been considered a glitchy blue image is transformed into an expansive and uplifting composition of line and color; where horizontal lines repeat across a field of blue, transforming an unknown subject into an evocative landscape.
The second series of paintings, Block Theory, emphasizes the autonomy of each block of color, using a limited palette (typically 5 to 8 colors). It involves careful color selection, spatial composition, and proportion, ensuring that each block contributes to the overall balance and impact of the work. By framing color as both an aesthetic and intellectual tool, the result is a more structured and expressive form of abstraction. This is especially true of RACT, where 9 paintings are grouped together as a single piece, allowing us to better appreciate the underlying structure and logic of these paintings, which achieve a much greater impact than a single painting would.
The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to stainless steel and aluminum sculptures. The first series, Protein Structure in stainless steel, is inspired by proteins, DNA and RNA. These forms are the essential building blocks of life. Here they are magnified many millions of times until the original form that determines each of our features and characteristics is now our size. With its anthropomorphic quality, *Libre* encourages reflection on our connection to the most essential components that make up all living things.
The final group, 6061T Aluminum, highlights craftsmanship and the simple beauty of organic forms found in everyday life. Rather than directly translating these forms into metal, Overlie adapts them to suit the properties of aluminum, considering factors like edges, surfaces, and reflectivity. The reflective surfaces subtly encourage viewers to see themselves within their surroundings, suggesting that perspectives can shift depending on how we choose to look at the world.
Jeff Overlie (b. 1968, Fort Collins, CO) initially studied marine biology before turning to visual arts and developing a practice influenced by science, mathematics, and spatial relationships. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Getty Museum (2024), and is held in private, corporate, and public collections. Between 2009 and 2022, he was represented by Riva Yares Gallery and later by Yares Art. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has completed several public and corporate commissions. Based in Santa Fe, NM, and Southern California, he has also taught sculpture and fabrication techniques as an adjunct professor.
