Please join for an opening reception for Olivia Zubko’s first show at Western Exhibitions, on Thursday, September 17, 5 to 8pm.

Western Exhibitions is pleased to announce our first solo show, Nymphaeum, with Olivia Zubko, a Chicago-based artist new to our roster. Zubko’s recent work employs cast replicas of fixtures and found materials from private, semi-private, and domestic environments to create ceramic sculptures evoking viewers’ personal memories and associations with intimate spaces. Her works investigate the nuanced relationship between these objects and the human form, as well as the broader dynamic between the individual and the domestic sphere of private space, personal intimacy, having a body, and the burdens and privileges of maintaining it. The show opens with a free public reception on THURSDAY, September 17, 5 to 8pm (during Chicago Exhibition Week) and runs through October 31. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

For Zubko, no object is too modest to use for appropriating into a material dialogue about metamorphosis. Cast porcelain dumbbells tessellate as repetitive units of laborious bodily upkeep. Single-use sheet masks swirl around a basin as reflections of a desire for a more perfect image. An orthopedic pillow assumes the role of a fleshy, corporeal fragment, both playful and possibly a touch foreboding. Her sculptural works recast these modest, mortal artifacts as mythological bathing nymphs, drawing reference from the long and expansive history of depicting “bathers” in both art and mythology. Celebrated, objectified and/or fetishized, bathers have been a trope throughout art history since antiquity, whether in a tub, basin, or outdoor body of water. Zubko’s work conflates historical depictions with modern sentiments towards private space and personal intimacy and focuses on the negative compositional space surrounding the bather while still invoking the sense of a body or its absence.

A nymphaeum is an ancient Greek and Roman sanctuary built as tribute to water nymphs that functioned as a public fountain, water reservoir, and gathering place. Nymphs, while associated with healing, prophecy, love, and the natural world, are also often characterized as unconventional outcasts who reject conformity to societal standards. In Zubko’s exhibition the Nymphaeum is translated into an intimate space like a bathroom or locker room, spaces often imbued with visceral associations. They may evoke vivid recollections, such as childhood experiences of bubble baths, illnesses, and quiet reflections as well as discordances with body image, identity, and development. Associations deeply rooted in personal experience render the bathroom a significant site for daily rituals, personal intimacy, and “self-care,” occupying a paradoxical space that can be both familiar and distant, public and private, safe and unsafe, sterile and emotional.

Olivia Zubko (born in 1995, Chicago, IL) has had solo and 2-person shows at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, California and in Chicagoland at The Arts Club of Chicago, DeGroot Fine Art, Cleaner Gallery + Projects, and McHenry County College. Her work has been included in group shows at Patient Info and The Plan, both in Chicago, and at Rockford University, Illinois. Zubko recently curated Deep Cuts! at The Plan, a group show of over 75 Chicago artists with works that were made when the artists were 12 years old or younger. She is a current fellow at The Arts Club of Chicago. Zubko received her BFA in 2020 from Northern Illinois University, and lives and works in Chicago.

Image: Cairn III , 2025, Stained porcelain. 16h x 6 1/2w x 6 1/2d in

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