Mie Olise works in large scale painting, video and “construction”. Her approach is brutal, romantic and melancholic. She works with narratives circling around abandoned man-made constructions and settlements; fallen utopian ideas and psychology according to Space. She travels to fallen apart places places, such as a Russian abandoned ghosttown by the Arctic Circle to investigate truth on subjective levels.

“Olise’s sheds are like shanty towns, outlaws’ hideaways or barricades hastily erected by revolutionaries. They exist, that is to say, in the same relation to an achieved architectural vision as does her use of paint to a seamless representation of a space that makes sense. The surface of her paintings is similarly multiple and variegated; even as everything tends towards the uniform brown of decay, the friable, desiccate substance produces fragments or flakes of colour: a pair of fat pink buoys, a burst of fresh foliage, a fragile pink pavilion erected atop a hulking grey mine tipple. The surface of this last painting is also laced with threads of white acrylic: drips and splashes that run off the canvas. Like the towering structure itself, with its pipes and gantries that extend out of the frame at energetic angles, the painted surface of the ruin remains unconstrained.” (Brian Dillon)

Olise’s Solo exhibitions include Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, TX and a solo museum show at SNYK, Skive New Museum of Art, DK. She was a finalist in the Saatchi competition ‘4 New Sensations’ in London.