Oliver Jackson

Untitled #10
Oil enamel on cotton canvas, 81″x115″, 1979

Oliver Jackson is an internationally known painter and sculptor. Originally from St. Louis, Jackson taught as Professor of Art at California State University, Sacramento, from 1971 until his retirement in 2003. He has served as Visiting Artist/Artist in Residence at a number of universities and art schools, including Harvard University; California College of Arts and Crafts Summer Institute in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, and others. Solo museum exhibitions include the Seattle Art Museum; St. Louis Art Museum and others. Works by Oliver Jackson are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and others.

Oliver Jackson’s paintings hold a sense of the inseparability of positive and negative space, figure and ground. His figures exist in intimate relation to their environment, sharing in its continual flux, movement and change. Jackson’s paintings convey a rare power and richness and fullness of vision.

Jackson’s sculptural oeuvre mixes elegance and toughness, expressionistic effects and a carefully calibrated use of those effects. Whether the point of departure is a chair, a chunk of wood, or a slab of marble, Jackson will inevitably transform it into a surrogate-often complex, subtle and indirect-for the human form.

And his works on paper reveal a masterful command of a variety of media and technical approaches, which the artist employs to create visual effects and complex compositional structures that draw the viewer into a charged and powerful spatial arena.

JacksonUnitiled77 Oliver Jackson
Untitled
Oil enamel on cotton canvas, 108″ x 180″, 1977