Olivia Pintér’s exhibition invites viewers into an intimate dialogue between hand, material, and movement

Notes in Flight – a solo exhibition by Olivia Pintér is on at David Krut Arts, 30 August to 4 October 2025. David Krut Arts, The Blue House, 151 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood

By CityLife Arts Writer

David Krut Projects is pleased to present Notes in Flight, a solo exhibition of new, unique works on paper and paintings by Olivia Pintér.

Notes in Flight explores how Pintér captures, as datapoints, affective gestures translating them into visual marks that carry emotional resonance. These works bring the often-unseen presence of the artist into focus, holding fleeting gestures, tactile traces, and memory within each image. They invite viewers into an intimate dialogue between hand, material, and movement.

The layered works on paper arise from the collaboration with Roxy Kaczmarek, long term collaborator at the David Krut Workshop in Maboneng, Johannesburg. From Pintér’s daily commute to the workshop, the sensory and linguistic textures of Johannesburg — its smog, dust, light, and layered urban landscape — subtly filter into her paintings, informing their visual and emotional language.

In these works, she explores how to articulate sensations that are felt but not fully understood. Abstract painting becomes a way to “language” affective gestures: subtle movements or encounters that linger. These impulses — whether sparked by colour, mood, or texture — accumulate into layered compositions, each work holding multiple moments and memories.

Materiality is equally vital to Pintér’s practice. She treats paint and surface as repositories of information, layering or obscuring these traces so that meaning emerges through abstraction.

Notes in Flight reveals how Pintér channels the abstract shapes of her impulses into the making process — allowing them to guide, resist, and inform each other. Her work does not offer a narrative, but a sensory and emotional entry point into her ongoing conversation with gesture, place, and material.

CITYLIFE/ARTS posed a few questions to the emerging South African artist. Allowing time for consideration and reflection on her answers, we were offered a rare glimpse into her artistry.

CITYLIFE/ARTS:How do you start your creative process?

Olivia Pintér:I always draw my creative inspiration from real life;inspiration seldom comes to me in the studio. I intimately observe lived moments, allowing myself to ruminate over them and finding specificities that stick. Only then, do I take my inspiration into the studio.

For example, I recently made a body of work at the David Krut Workshop after I was fascinated by the smog that clung to the city. On my way in every morning, I became more and more interested in the shape of the smog hanging over the city. I became mesmerised by how the smog diffused light, held colour and shape as a solid yet ephemeral form. This inspired my monotypes – emulating the shape and intricacies of the smog.

From this initial observational impulse, other marks and thoughts began to take shape. I lean into this, allowing impulses in the making process to guide, bounce, repel and inform one another. 

CITYLIFE/ARTS: What inspires your work?

OliviaPintér:Even though there’s no specific identity politic to my work, it’s strongly informed by personal experience. I’m inspired by many things including the action of traveling in and through Johannesburg, also literature, film and music with specific conversations and moments of storytelling as well as certain environmental observations. These ‘affective gestures’ are the data points which I translate into the marks to create my images.

The moments that inspire me most are held and rooted by the city of Johannesburg. The city almost always informs my work in some way or another. I am less concerned with personal moments of affectation being evident to the viewer. For me, it is about the gestural and emotive nature of my art practice holding these affective nodes in a temporal, abstracted manner.

CITYLIFE/ARTS: In what ways do you think art can impact society?

Olivia Pintér:Art offers perspective and extends our thinking into other worlds – it allows us to enter a space of knowledge and social connection in very tactile ways.

Today, our lived reality is so focussed on our own experiences that our worlds can become narrow. Even though they are necessary nodes of connection, the screens that we interact with are flat, smooth and soulless.

I’ve recently been thinking of the beauty of creations that feel tactile, carrying the presence of the person who made them. I think it’s becoming increasingly more important to engage the intricacies of the notsmooth, at-the-hand, information offered by art and the artist.   

CITYLIFE/ARTS: How would you define your artistic style?

OliviaPintér: My work is decisively abstract with gesture as a prominent characteristic, often translating into an image with a landscape lurking somewhere in the composition.

I work with colour intuitively; sometimes the work is held within a loud colour palette and at other times, it is much quieter.

CITYLIFE/ARTS: What do you hope to communicate through your art?

Olivia Pintér:While I’d like for the considerations of my work to be enjoyed by the viewer, the intentions and desires of my work isn’t really relevant to what I want to communicate.

The art of abstraction offers multiple points of entry: each being unique to the viewer. I can only hope that what the viewer understands at these points of entry is enriching. 

CITYLIFE/ARTS: What makes you happy as an artist?

Olivia Pintér: For me, it’s important to find harmony between my life and my work; engaging with others creatively, intellectually and socially while taking care of the more mundane aspects of daily living is an art in itself.

As far as my work is concerned, I’m truly happy when it reached a kind of flow state. Early on, creating a work can feel awkward and clumsy. Until a specific point where something sticks and the work becomes easier.

Once I’m over the initial self-conscious phase of the process, it can feel like the practice begins to sustain itself, marks produce marks and ideas produce more ideas. This is when I start taking myself less seriously and where I start to experiment.  

CITYLIFE/ARTS: Who is your favourite artist and why?

Olivia Pintér:  I think you’d agree that it is not possible to have only one favourite artist!

My interest in abstraction naturally draws me to abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Mark Rothko,Mitchell’s loud expansive surfaces and Rothko’s immersive fields.MoshekwaLanga’s and Serge Alain Nitegeka’s work represent many of my visual interests, especially Langa’s use of text and Nitegeka’s graphic forms.

Olivia Pinter: On a figurative level, I am drawn to Marlene Dumas, Mamma Andersson, Michael Armitage and Blake Daniels. Even though I don’t work with figuration,I look to figurative painters not only for compositional insight but also because I’m conscious of how sensitive the artist must be when rendering the body. I often think about how such sensitivity can be applied in abstraction and in landscape.

CITYLIFE/ARTS: What mediums/processes have you worked in and which of these are the most expressive for you?

OliviaPintér:I’m drawn to processes that leave space for uncertain outcomes to emerge, allowing elements of chance to push and pull an image into or out of itself.

Materiality is an important part of my practice, I enjoy discovering how the manipulation of materials can produce certain marks in the construction of an image, becoming carriers of information. Typically, I enjoy working with oil painting and drawing with ink, charcoal and graphite.

I recently enjoyed a new and stimulating opportunity of producing oil monotypes under the skilled guidance of David Krut Workshop’s Roxy Kaczmarek.

CITYLIFE/ARTS: Who has been the biggest influence on your artistic development. Why?

OliviaPintér:In my artistic practice, I’m deeply inspired by and grateful for Professor David Andrew’s guidance.

His sharp eye and decisive, demanding attitude challenged me to push myself and my work in ways I’d never have done on my own; he encouraged me to trust my instincts and to work in the middle ground between confidence and scepticism. By constantly encouraging me to ‘keep working’, ‘go bigger’ and ‘experiment’ he had an enormous influence on my formative years as an artist.

Artist biography

Olivia Pintér (b. 2000 – Johannesburg, South Africa) graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2023. Her practice centres around process-based methodologies that interrogate the affective agencies of abstract painting.

Concerned with painting-in-action as a means of mediating and distilling information in material form, Pintér’s practice interrogates how a painting can communicate beyond representation. The relationship between image and text are central to the artist’s artistic practice, focussing on how interventions between these modalities complement, extend and limit each other.