Oli Sihvonen

Oli Sihvonen (1921–1991) was a post-war American artist known for hard-edge abstract paintings. Sihvonen's style was greatly influenced by Josef Albers who taught him color theory and Bauhaus aesthetics at Black Mountain College in the 1940s. Sihvonen was also influenced by Russian Constructivism, Piet Mondrian, and Pierre Matisse. His work has been linked to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Hard-Edge and Op-Art.
Biography.
Oli Sihvonen was a Finnish-American born in Brooklyn, New York in 1921. He began his art career by attending the Norwich Art School, now known as Norwich University College of the Arts, in Connecticut from 1933 to 1938. He then studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1938 to 1941. He served in the U. S. Army during World War II. After which he studied art from his mentor Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1948, where he met and befriended many people including Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, John Cage. Tapestry weaver Joan Potter Loveless also attended Black Mountain and the couple married in 1947.
Throughout his career Sihvonen was noted for his dedication to painting that began at Black Mountain College and carried through to his time in Taos, Mexico where he started to be recognized for his ellipse paintings, and then also in New York where he received much critical, if not financial, success. "His entire body of work remained clean, objective and flat, with no gestural or emotional contrivances."
After graduating from Black Mountain, Sihvonen lived and studied in New Mexico under the G.I. Bill at Louis Ribak’s Taos Valley Art School from 1949 to 1950. He then went to Mexico where he painted murals. He then moved to Washington D.C. and later New York where he taught at Hunter College and Cooper Union. In the 1950s Sihvonen moved to Taos, New Mexico where he stayed until the 1960s. During this time he painted large canvases and diptychs. While in Taos he was considered a part of a group of modern artists known as the Taos Moderns. Because of the scale and subject matter of his paintings there wasn't a strong market for them in New Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s, but he was gaining attention in New York. In 1965 The Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his Ellipse paintings for the exhibition "The Responsive Eye." He moved to back to New York in 1967.
Through the 1970s and 1980s Sihvonen continued to paint and exhibit regularly. He spent time with Allan Graham in New York - in the mid to late 1980s Sihvonen gave Graham a roll of echocardiograms of his heart and suggested he make something out of them. These became Graham's 1995 series "Heart Sutra" and they were exhibited alongside a selection of Sihvonen's paintings in 2000 at a SITE Santa Fe exhibition.