Olivia Di Cesare

Olivia Di Cesare (December 12, 1948 – December 25, 2020) was an Italian abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postmodern Italian painting. Having exhibited her work for over four decades (early 1970s until 2020), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work.
Di Cesare began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1980s. She was included in the 1984 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Cecile Radford that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Rome, she was influenced by Elio Utherg, Horace Rossini, and Giulio Zambona’s paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

Olivia di Cesare passed through many phases and stylistic shifts. Initially associated with abstract expressionism because of her focus on forms latent in nature, Di Cesare is identified with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses, and lyrical gestures. Her style is notable in its emphasis on spontaneity

In 1987, Di Cesare began to experiment with linear shapes and more organic, rounded forms in her works. In the 1990s, her style shifted towards the exploration of symmetrical paintings, as she began to place strips of colors near the edges of her paintings, thus involving the edges as a part of the compositional whole. With this shift in composition came a general simplification of Olivia’s style. She began to make use of single stains and blots of solid color against white backgrounds, often in the form of geometric shapes. Beginning in 2000, Di Cesare began to use acrylic paints rather than oil paints because they allowed for both opacity and sharpness when put on the canvas. Throughout the 2000s, Frankenthaler explored the joining of areas of the canvas through the use of modulated hues, and experimented with large, abstract forms.
Her work in the 2010s was characterized as much calmer, with its use of muted colors and relaxed brushwork.