Tennessee-based painter Morgan Ogilvie is having her first European solo exhibition at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Basel, Switzerland. Ogilvie earned her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

The Frist Art Museum exhibited her painting Secure Destruction You Can Trust in the show Enough to Go Around presented in the Conte Community Arts Gallery. Her work was also featured in Artforum.com’s MFA Spotlight, where her painting The Annunciation was highlighted, and five of her paintings were published in The Vassar Review issue Protest, Prophecy, Play. Hyperallergic covered the group exhibition Time is Out of Joint, in which she participated.

Ogilvie’s work often centers on the “unreliable” female narrator, using painterly strategies to examine cultural mythologies, narrative slippage, and contemporary psychological tensions. 

“Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, historically, Southern females were sometimes implicitly taught to deflect their own idiosyncratic perspective—to conform. This anachronistic pressure lingered even when I was growing up. I subvert this dynamic by giving vulnerable femininity a grand presence. I bestow this empowered agency onto my anti-heroines, letting them force the viewer to face this discomfort.

I construct a stage with an anti-heroine whom I do not rescue. What might it feel like to be in her shoes? Furthermore, I cast difficult figures such as Mia Farrow in the 1968 cult film Rosemary’s Baby, Typhoid Mary, the Irish immigrant cook and disease vector, and Martha Mitchell, (wife of the Nixon administration attorney general) who was caught up in Watergate and slandered as a quintessential unreliable narrator. I place these women in a position to be reconsidered.

Through exaggerated scale and uncomfortable cropping I create a suggestion of danger that takes place beyond the edge of the canvas. Interweaving articulate figuration with distorted perspectives invites the viewer to question what they think they know about historical characters or fictional stories. In capturing the anticipation of conflict, I allow for new ways of knowing these archetypal figures.”