Olga Goldina Hirsch

Written By Art Market .

Olga Goldina Hirsch, MA FA, was born in Moscow, USSR and moved to London about 15 years ago.
She is a London-based British artist who specialises in abstract conceptual painting and masterfully combines abstraction and figuration in her work. Her art is widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

Olga received her MA in Fine Art from the City and Guilds of London Art School (Birmingham University) in 2018. Prior to that, she had completed her studies at the Putney School of Art and Design. She also took various short art courses at SLADE, Chelsea School of Art, and City Lit.

In 2024, she had her solo exhibition The Solstice Begins! at the Coningsby Gallery, London. In 2022, she was the runner-up of the TEBBS International Art Award. She is also the recipient of the Cazenove Capital Prize and member of the Taylor Foundation, Paris.

In November 2023, she became a recipient of the Creative Excellence Award by Circle Foundation for the Arts. Olga’s work was also shortlisted for the Hastings Open 2022 Prize.

In 2021, a work from Olga’s series Who Am I? was featured in the acclaimed catalogue of Le Salon des Artistes Françaises.

In June and December 2023 and June 2024, her paintings were displayed on the iconic Times Square screens in Broadway Plaza, New York.

Olga’s works can be found in USA including Brooklyn Art Library, in the Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens; in the Artetage Centre of Contemporary Art in Vladivostok and in private collections across the UK, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Canada, and the USA.

Relying on the avant-garde heritage and artistic traditions of her family, Olga explores the transgenerational impact of tumultuous historical events that happened throughout the 20th century on her family (grandparents and parents). Her works are original philosophical commentaries on the loss and recovery of historical memories and the possibility of healing collective and family past.

• My practice is an artistic and philosophical commentary that investigates ways of representing long-lost personal and collective memories. I work in mixed media and combine traditional painting, screen printing, stencilling and other kinds of printing.

• Some of my works suggest a layered, fragmentary aesthetic where figures emerge and dissolve into the background evoking the sense of memory, absence and ephemeral identity. Overall, my artistic approach aligns with themes of unveiling what is unseen, unsaid, and unheard—bringing forth a presence that exists in the liminal space between memory and forgetting, present and future. In my works, absence speaks as loudly as presence. The use of ethereal, fragmented silhouettes and textual elements suggest an exploration of memory and collective unconscious. I also address crises of identity caused by the loss of historical memories, and the possibility of healing through filling in theses gaps in the collective and family past.

• The blurred contours of human silhouettes resemble distant recollections, fragmented memories that refuse to solidify. This technique resonates with approaches to deconstructing identity, where figures are presented in a state of flux, rather than as concrete, fully defined subjects. They exist in a state of transition—neither fully formed nor entirely absent, they melt into and emerge from their surroundings, suggesting both dissolution and persistence.

• Text and image go hand in hand in my practice. As the shapes in my artworks are unstable, elusive and fluid, I believe that poetry is the best form to describe my work.

• My works are conceptually and technically multi-layered. They are like palimpsests, revealing complex l messages to the viewer. The black background has strong symbolic connotations. I started paint by attempting to open my own “black square”, i.e. by reclaiming the fragments of the long-forgotten memories out of “black holes” and abysses of oblivion. I attempt to find my own foothold in the void represented by the areas of white. However, the void is not entirely blank, but replete with information.

• The role of light is also crucial. The rays of light, falling on various areas of my paintings, become metaphor for mental focus. As the eye strains to decipher what has been erased, it mirrors the way memory functions. The flickering, luminescent details in each work evoke the silvery flashbacks of recollections. The eye focussing on each detail emerging from the chaos of images is tantamount to memory that brings forth specific recollections. Thus, the spaces that initially appeared dark or blind, start suddenly throbbing with life and movement. These seemingly dark and obscure areas then turn out to be populated with figures, silhouettes, vague contours, and outlines. The texture of the painterly surfaces can also drastically transform under the changing light, by acquiring depth and transparency. In this way, the effect of my paintings can be compared to cinematic.

"WHAT IS ERASED IS NEVER TRULY GONE.

IT LINGERS, LIKE BREATH ON GLASS, A TRACE WAITING TO BE SEEN."

My works visually explore the tension between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, wholeness and dissolution. They overlay past and present, real and unreal, in order to interrogate loss.

My approach is deeply rooted in abstraction, layering, and the manipulation of form to evoke a sense of bodies that exist in traces, rather than in full form.

My layering technique consisting of such elements as stencilled figures, hazy textures, and scattered textual fragments, directly corresponds to fractured memories that I attempt to convey.

My interests align with the themes found in Conceptual and Memory Art. I feel inspired by select works by Christian Boltanski, Shimon Attie, William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer. Overall, I prefer to engage with the politics of forgetting and remembering, using material absence to evoke deep historical presence. In other words, I like to explore what is referred to as “post-memory” in Marianne Hirsch’s writings.

My art essentially explores "remembering" the past through the lens of those who lived in it. I also find inspiration in Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology,” a concept that suggests that the past continues to haunt the present, refusing to be fully buried or forgotten.

Unlike traditional history, which assumes a clear break between past and present, hauntology suggests that unresolved histories remain as ghostly presences, shaping contemporary reality. And I do believe that the present contains multiple traces of the past.

As the shapes in my artworks are so unstable, elusive and fluid, I believe that poetry is the best form to describe my art. Therefore, some of my works have companion poems written by myself.

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