Olive Allen is a Russian-born New York-based tech entrepreneur and visual artist working at the intersection of art, tech, and gaming. She is a cryptocurrency early adopter and one of the pioneers of the NFT space.
Olive Allen is one of the first artists to work with the concept of Metaverse by creating immersive virtual environments and exploring this new world's implications on society at large. Her recent solo show at Postmasters Gallery in New York featured an immersive installation that incorporated a full-fledged virtual environment built in Unreal Engine.
Even though Olive had been a traditional painter, she started her journey in the NFT space as a founder and spent 2018-early '19 in Silicon Valley working on the NFT marketplace Decadent under which brand in 2019 she did the very first NFT drop in history and coined the term. One of the most popular NFT marketplaces today, and indirectly many others, were influenced by Olive's early work.
Since then, her NFT artworks have been a part of a museum show and acquired by many prominent collectors in both NFT space, and the traditional art world. She exhibited with König Gallery (Berlin), Postmasters (New York), Nagel Draxler Gallery (Cologne), and Christie's, among others. Olive's NFT artwork Post-Death was the first NFT sold at a major international art fair, Art Basel in Switzerland.
Now Olive is focusing on building the Metaverse as a better: more fair, and inclusive virtual environment where everyone can realize their true potential.
#Retouched explores the disparate meanings of touch and the act of something being retouched. Touching a person’s body can be comforting, empathetic and a form of connection; however, it can also be unwelcoming, forceful, and demeaning. Retouching is a technique that makes alterations to an image, eliminating an imperfection and implying that an improvement has been made. We have the ability to change ourselves and our environments in the physical and digital spaces, but who are we ameliorating for? Using AI powered or synthetic intelligence to use different techniques such as clone stamping, zoom quilting, liquifying, photo compositing, and digital matte painting, the artworks use a hybridization of recognizable signs, pop culture symbols, and androgynous figures that shift between the familiar and uncanny, the primordial and the
futurist, nostalgia and hope.
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#Retouched was organized in partnership with CADAF.
