How can I buy a work by Patricia Olynyk?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by Patricia Olynyk. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

Where can I see work by Patricia Olynyk in person?

At Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, during public hours or by appointment. Her work is also in the collections of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

What does Patricia Olynyk make?

Photographs, prints, videos and installations about science, technology and the body, often built from microscopy and biomedical imaging, such as the light sculpture Oculus (2018), The Mutable Archive and the three-channel video Black Swan in Three Variations, made with Adam Hogan.

Where is Patricia Olynyk based?

Patricia Olynyk lives and works in New York and St. Louis, Missouri.

Has Patricia Olynyk had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Black Swan in Three Variations (Project Room) (7 November to 20 December 2025); Black Swan in Three Variations (20 September 2024 to 25 January 2025) are among her exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

Patricia Olynyk

Patricia Olynyk is a New York- and St. Louis-based multimedia artist who makes photographs, prints, videos and installations about science, technology and the ways social and institutional systems shape how people understand the body and nature. Born in Canada, she often works with scientists, humanists and engineers on “third culture” projects, creating environments that make viewers aware of their own bodies and surroundings.

Much of the work uses microscopy and biomedical imaging to unsettle the viewer’s sense of scale. Sensing Terrains paired electron micrographs of tissue with photographs of Japanese gardens, and Oculus (2018) is a light sculpture based on a fruit fly’s eye. The Mutable Archive starts from human specimens collected by the 19th-century anatomist Josef Hyrtl, with writers and performers voicing speculative biographies of their subjects. Black Swan in Three Variations, a three-channel video made with Adam Hogan, draws on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ideas about improbable, high-impact events.

Olynyk received a Diploma of Visual Art from what is now Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary (1983) and an MFA with distinction from the California College of the Arts (1988), then spent four years in Japan as a Monbusho and Tokyu Foundation research scholar. She taught at the University of Michigan from 1999 to 2007, becoming the first non-scientist appointed to its Life Sciences Institute in 2005. From 2007 to 2020 she was founding director of the Graduate School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art. She also co-chairs New York’s LASER Talks series.

Her solo exhibitions include Sensing Terrains at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (2006), and Dark Skies at the UCLA Art|Sci Center (2012), which named her its inaugural Medicine + Media Arts Fellow in 2020. Her other fellowships include the Helmut S. Stern Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and her work is in collections including Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. Bruno David Gallery presented her solo exhibition Probe in 2008, accompanied by the catalogues Probe and Sensing Terrains, and has since shown The Mutable Archive (2020), Oculus (2020) and Black Swan in Three Variations (2024 and 2025).

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