Exhibition: 'High Society' by Jeff Ostergren

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.