Erik Olson
In the Garden
September 25, 2025—February 15, 2026
In the Garden is a series of large-scale oil paintings begun by Erik Olson in Düsseldorf, Germany during the early, uncertain months of the pandemic in 2020. The works draw on the historic Hofgarten—Germany’s oldest public park—as both a physical site and a psychological landscape. Thinking of the liminal space between order and freedom, Olson expanded the series this year to include imaginative, dreamlike explorations, removed from specificities of place.
Olson’s canvases teem with narrative potential: animals stalk, waters reflect, solitary figures lie in moments of reflection or doubt. These are pauses between the familiar and the unknown that conjure the garden as a threshold—at the city’s edge or just around the corner—a surreal space between anxiety and longing.
In more recent works, the garden becomes increasingly theatrical, a site for performance, memory, and projection. Olson positions the park as a communal mind-space: a place implicitly understood as a site of memory, reflection, and social change. It is a space where personal myth meets collective transformation, where the imagined and the observed intertwine.
Formally, Olson deploys the visual language of landscape—tree lines, paved paths, and open skies. However, these elements are more suggestive than descriptive, like fragments of memory or imagined scenes. Colour functions with intent: sharp contrasts, radiant hues, and atmospheric light evoke a world that feels vivid and surreal. Scale and perspective place the viewer on uncertain ground—never fully inside the scene, nor fully outside it. We stand on the brink of the garden’s illusion, where every path leads inward as well as outward.
Rather than offering escape, the works reflect back the complexities we bring into them. The garden becomes a site of reckoning—a space where internal landscapes are externalized and where desire, unease, and recollection shift and intertwine. Olson’s garden does not allow us to turn away; it invites us to look more deeply, holding a mirror to both the world outside and the one within.
Curated by Kanika Anand.
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About the Artist
Erik Olson (he/him)
Erik Olson (b. 1982 in Calgary, Canada) has lived a nomadic life, having been raised in Calgary, Boston, and Nairobi as a child. He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver in 2007. From 2014 to 2016, he attended the acclaimed Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a guest student of Peter Doig. Olson has been the subject of solo exhibitions in cities across Canada, the United States, and Europe. His work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Juxtapoz Magazine, ELLE Canada, and The Rheinische Post, among others. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Ivey Business School. Olson currently lives and works in Calgary.
About the Curator
Kanika Anand (she/her)
Kanika Anand is the Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary, Canada and co-curator of the Indian Ceramics Triennale, India. Her curatorial approach focuses on placemaking and social practices that interrogate structures of power and modes of engagement. Through a lens of interstitial discourse, constructs of time, social space, and traces of mobility remain a keen area of interest and research.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Delhi University and a Master’s degree in Art History from the National Museum Institute, India. She has been curatorial fellow at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2012-13) and fellow at the Global Cultural Leadership Programme, organised by the Cultural Diplomacy Platform and the European Cultural Foundation (2018). She has worked extensively with galleries and institutions across North America, France and India and has worked on major exhibitions of work by Yoko Ono, Chitra Ganesh, Diane Arbus, Marcel Dzama, Paola Pivi. She has written for art journals like Ocula, Art India, and Art Basel and has contributed to several books on contemporary art.
