Olea Nova is a visual artist and composer. In her practice she engages with diverse artistic strategies, mediums and techniques – oil painting on canvas, drawing, object making, video and sound. She plays and composes for piano and a variety of electronic instruments including the Theremin and other analog synthesizers. In 2019 Olea Nova performed her Mono-Opera “In Dust” for the Theremin and analog synthesizers during her large-scale paintings exhibition “Air” at the Evanston Art Center.

For Olea Nova composing paintings and music are two parallel processes where articulation of space is one of the important aspects. She embraces dissonance and polyphony, focuses on vectors of movement and speed of sounds that are tactile and spacious, through air and time. In her compositional processes she relies on the simple idea of arranging various materials within a larger form that is changing over time. There is no narrative content in her work. By exploring her sense of non-objective form Olea Nova dematerializes objects and creates space that is non-referential.

Olea Nova’s intent is for each work to have its own actuality. Work unfolds encompassing contradictions, dissonances and accidents. Resulting dynamic forms are in a state of continuous transformation. Through form Olea Nova strives to give a sense of contemporaneity. She focuses on the human perception through the interaction of lines, sounds and color, while simultaneously keeping to the improvisational mode of working and leaving the content open for multiple cultural readings.