Lindsey Kircher “Lady Rider From Hell” 2026, oil on canvas/Oliva Gallery
Lindsey Kircher’s solo exhibition at Oliva Gallery in Logan Square, “Girl Talk,” is more than just talk. Kircher, a Chicago-based artist and teacher, earned her MFA in drawing and painting from the School of the Art Institute in 2023 and, for the last year, has focused mainly on her work for “Girl Talk.”
Kircher, born in Paris, France, has exhibited in Chicago, New York, London and Italy. Currently, she is a youth visual art instructor and a lecturer at SAIC. Her work, teaching and studies in Chicago have clearly influenced her painting style and technique.
Lindsey Kircher “Fountain of Youth,” 72×60 in., oil on canvas, 2026/Oliva Gallery
“Girl Talk” covers themes of femininity, exposure, fantasy and the male gaze, warping it and contorting it into something malformed, fantastical and captivating. Kircher’s use of color in “Grotto Girl” and “Fountain of Youth” are reminiscent of Ed Paschke’s brilliant hues and Roger Brown’s strong color contrasts—those leather shorts in “Fountain of Youth” are definitely channeling Brown, and the neon colors of “Grotto Girl” are giving glimmers of Paschke. Kircher’s older works are exemplary of this, like her oil on canvas, “No Tears Left to Cry,” 2021 and “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.”
In “Girl Talk,” Kircher’s paintings are nostalgic of eighties and nineties femme imagery. Thick cartoonish-like lines, various domestic decor and iconography from the decade—think animal print, pumps, parrots and poodles—intertwined with spliced, Picasso-like limbs, breasts, big hair and feminine features. Having been influenced by the beauty queens of the 1980s, Kircher draws inspiration from saved media and uses clippings from publications like Playboy and old pornography rags, and now-relic shows like “Baywatch,” to start her process. Like many artists, including Paschke, it’s clear that Kircher is enamored with emblems from the eighties, and the effects of media and television on the psyche. Kircher’s work in “Girl Talk” is like witnessing an interpretation of what it’s like to absorb these projections of sexuality, power, kink, beauty and spit them back out.
Lindsey Kircher “Grotto Girl,” 60×48 in., oil on canvas, 2026/Oliva Gallery
Kircher intentionally distorts eroticism that has historically centered around masculine perspective and pleasure. The objects in her paintings represent the popular decor of the times, as do the women. The figures in Kircher’s paintings denote decoration and performance, the feminine figures look out at the viewer, and by doing so acknowledge the spectacle and indicate their mutuality. There’s vulnerability in performing, like painting, but there’s so much power too. A couple of the paintings reveal Kircher’s own features, suggesting a power play of exhibitionist-voyeur the artist might be playing with the public. Kircher gnarls glamour, but she’s also toying with desire, but who’s? Hers? Theirs? Ours? It’s an interesting riddle. Much of the paintings also have this vapor-wave, digital style of a mass of entities floating in space or a virtual world (this is clearer in previous works as well).
“Girl Talk” is a small show with only eight paintings, however, I think we’re only at the beginning of Kircher’s career. Looking over her paintings from 2020 to now, Kircher’s shift in technique and experimentation is expanding, and while she is fine-tuning her new style it will be interesting to keep tabs on. We’re into it, keep talking, Girl.
Girl Talk is on view at Oliva Gallery through May 30, 2026.
