Olive Diamond: Rehearsals for Living

LOS ANGELES—Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Rehearsals for Living, a solo exhibition of new multi-tile ceramic tableau, paintings, and sculptural vessels by Los Angeles artist Olive Diamond. The exhibition is on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from April 18 through May 23, with an opening reception Saturday, April 18, 6-8 pm. Rehearsals for Living is a poetic response to the world of childhood—to its innocence and imagination as well as the structural conditions through which knowledge and morality are first encountered. Across Diamond’s recent works, dense and dissipating scenes depict children at play alongside fragments of the industrializing world of steam engines, scaffolding, and factories. Dripping, bubbling, and pooling glazes, along with the gestural brushwork of the paintings, contribute to Diamond’s atmospheres of delight and discovery. Through toys and play activities, children scale down and rehearse the adult world. The exhibition centers on these formative moments, where children begin to model cultural understandings of law, ritual, love, and war. Diamond treats toys as interfaces for human ambition, technological progress, belief systems, and fantasy. Objects such as teddy bears, dominos, and swing sets become exploratory structures that shape perceptions of time, causality, and morality. Across the exhibition, individual works articulate these ideas through distinct formal strategies. In a composition titled Play Things that recalls early industrial production, three women assemble identical teddy bears, while the space around them fractures into pure color and gesture. In a vertical ceramic tableau titled Sticks, Rocks, and Building Blocks, a young girl swings between trees as the world below—constructed from building blocks—compresses landscape and architecture into an imaginative axis of daydream suspended beneath her.