High Society
Jeff Ostergren at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by New Haven-based painter Jeff Ostergren.

Jeff Ostergren makes art about the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color. His pointillist, color-saturated paintings, sculptures, and videos, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment. The “pharmakon,” a Greek term that simultaneously means cure, poison, and paint and is the origin of the English words “pharmaceutical” and “toxic,” is a concept that centers the work. 

Ostergren works from images taken from pharmaceutical advertising that bear an uncanny reference to art historical works, particularly from the Impressionist period, which was contemporaneous with the rise of synthetic chemistry. These images of idealized leisure form potent means of understanding representations of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class. 

He transforms these advertisements into vibrant pointillist paintings of figures in landscapes and blasts of abstract patterns. Working on synthetic substrates such as polyester canvas stretched over PVC bars, each dot, made with custom tools, is a particular pill’s exact size and shape. Each oval is the color that corresponds to the branding of that pharmaceutical, an actual sample of which is mixed into the paint. Ostergren believes that each molecule of pigment or drug, be it pleasurably mind-altering, physically poisonous, or both, contains the entire history of its invention, production, marketing, and consumption. By infusing those molecules into the painting, he references the complicated histories of these chemicals.

Pharmaceuticals have played a significant role throughout human history, both in terms of their prescribed usage and recreational function. Today, the interplay of politics and economics in the pharmaceutical industry is a pressing societal issue. As a barrage of pharmaceutical options is on offer, we are faced with contradictory moments in which significant advances in human health and possibilities of new levels of pleasure meet violent spirals of addiction and overdose. Ostergren’s exhibition serves as a timely and thought-provoking exploration of these complex dynamics.

High Society brings together a selection of Ostergren’s paintings from the last few years, during which he has pushed his signature “pharmaceutical pointillist” style into new realms of monumental scale and kaleidoscopic optical vibrations. 

This exhibition is sponsored in part by The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

 

About the Artist

Jeff Ostergren makes paintings, sculptures, videos, drawings, and installations about the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color. His pointillist, color-saturated works, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment.

Originally trained as an anthropologist, Jeff has been a practicing artist for two decades. Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, and a two part project called “A Suitcase” at Picture Theory in New York City and Kunstraum Super in Vienna, Austria. 

Recent exhibitions include “Double Take: Familiar Objects in Unexpected Materials” at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT, “The Past Pushes Forward” at Omola Studios in New Haven, CT, and “Circadian Rhythms,” curated by URSA Gallery in Bridgeport, CT. In 2018, he completed a 2,400 square foot solo site-specific installation “Science For a Better Life,” in which he explored the chemical and visual history of Bayer Pharmaceuticals at Yale University’s West Campus in New Haven, a former Bayer facility. 

Ostergren is a recipient of a 2024 Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He also received an Artist Grant from the Puffin Foundation earlier this year. In 2023, he was awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists Grant, an annual project based-grant in New Haven. He was also chosen a 2021 “Artist-To-Watch” by Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY.

He also has a curatorial practice, including a well-reviewed exhibition “False Flag: The Space Between Reason and Paranoia” at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT in 2018. In addition, from 2018-2019, Ostergren ran Tilia Projects, a community exhibition space, out of his studio in New Haven.

Ostergren received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2006, following upon receiving a BA in a double major of anthropology and gender studies at Rice University in Houston, TX in 1998. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.