August, 2025
Featured Artist

Olga Bologo is a self-taught artist based in Santa Barbara, California. Born in the Ural Mountains of the former USSR and raised partly in southern India, her early life shaped a deep sensitivity to landscape, memory, and impermanence. With a background in comparative linguistics and metaphor theory, Olga’s work reflects a quiet search for the emotional textures beneath what we see—those elusive moments where perception, language, and feeling intertwine.

Her drawings are primarily rendered in charcoal, a medium she describes as “both shadow and smoke—what disappears as it reveals.” Her approach is contemplative, often working in silence, allowing the forms to surface slowly through layered gesture and erasure. The result is a body of work that holds stillness and motion in tension, where absence becomes as evocative as presence.

Her debut solo exhibition, Toska, will be on view at Gallery 113 from August 5 to August 30. Framed in charred wood and composed in delicate, elongated formats, the drawings explore the bittersweet ache of longing—Toska—a Russian word that captures the soul’s yearning for something unnamed, both distant and near. Each piece invites the viewer to pause, to lean into nuance, and to sense the invisible currents that shape our inner lives.

“I paint what can’t be captured,” she writes, “the passing light, the breath between memories, the small moment that feels eternal.”

Toska marks not only a debut but a quiet arrival—an offering from an artist attuned to the fragile and fleeting, drawing beauty from what hovers just beyond words.

website: olgabologo.net