At the Blue House in Parkwood, Johannesburg, Olivia Pintér’s solo exhibition, Notes in Flight, offers visitors an intimate encounter with abstraction.
She first explored landscapes, particularly the gold mining tailings dams that dot the Johannesburg skyline. Over time, her repeated depictions evolved into abstraction, allowing her to hold memory, emotion, and sensation in her work without offering literal representation. Her paintings do not hand the viewer a direct narrative; instead, they invite a dialogue, a quiet exploration of gestures and colour that carry the traces of lived experience.

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Johannesburg pulses through her work in subtle yet undeniable ways. The city’s smog, dust, light, and ceaseless motion inform the rhythm of her brushstrokes, creating a visual and emotional texture that feels both personal and universal. Pintér draws inspiration not only from the environment but from literature, film, music, and moments of storytelling, which she calls ‘affective gestures.’ These gestures serve as data points that she translates into marks, building compositions that are at once intuitive and considered.

Collaboration has also shaped this body of work. Working with printmaker Roxy Kaczmarek at the David Krut Workshop in Maboneng, Pintér developed layered works on paper and oil monotypes. The process allows chance and materiality to play a role in the creation of the image, producing results that feel alive, tactile, and present. She describes her happiest moments in the studio as those when she reaches a flow state, when marks produce marks and ideas generate new ideas, and the act of creation feels effortless.

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Curator Ame Bell first encountered Pintér’s work when she received the David Krut Book Prize in 2024. The confidence of her mark-making immediately struck a bell, the nuanced use of colour, and the subtle layering of texture. She notes that Pintér’s practice allows viewers to engage on their own terms, responding to the emotional and sensory residues the artist captures rather than a prescribed meaning.

In Notes in Flight, Johannesburg is more than a backdrop; it is a collaborator. Its chaos, comfort, industrial smog, and luminous sunsets permeate the works, shaping their emotional and visual rhythm. Pintér offers a personal and expansive experience, inviting each viewer to find their own entry point into the work. The exhibition is an unfolding conversation between artist, city, and audience, and a testament to the power of abstraction to translate life, memory, and movement into visual poetry. Notes in Flight will be on display at the Blue House in Parkwood until the end of October.

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