Feature image: Courtesy of Oliva Gallery
Exhibition Dates: October 9–November 7, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, October 9, 2026, 5:00–9:00 PM
Special Preview Event: Thursday, October 8, 2026
Presented with Vagabond Art
Ticketed collectors preview featuring artist-inspired drinks and bites
Location: Oliva Gallery, 3816 W. Armitage Ave., Chicago, IL 60647
Submitted
Chicago, IL – Oliva Gallery presents Pleasure Spread, a two-person exhibition featuring Tara Sabini and Jeremy Plotkin Wong. Sabini’s maximalist paintings meet Wong’s biomorphic ceramic sculpture in an exhibition where pleasure is never uncomplicated. Attraction draws the viewer in, then begins to misbehave.
Sabini’s paintings are rooted in the theatrical abundance of seventeenth-century Flemish still life, particularly its uneasy proximity between luxury and mortality. She redirects that history toward femininity. Her compositions are sumptuous to the point of pressure. Pattern tightens around the figure; ornament ceases to embellish and begins to impose. What first appears seductive gradually acquires psychological weight.
Surrealism gives Sabini a means of making that instability visible. Forms slip into one another rather than holding their assigned roles. The body can become decorative, and decoration can turn strangely corporeal. Pleasure remains present, but it is never innocent. The paintings understand sensuality as something vulnerable to scrutiny, expectation, and shame.
Wong approaches the body through ceramics, beginning with the vessel and pushing it past utility. Their sculptures swell, curl, open, and contort into forms that seem animate without becoming fully figurative. The glaze heightens their physicality. Smooth surfaces make the objects immediately appealing, even as their anatomy remains uncertain.
That uncertainty gives Wong’s work much of its force. The sculptures can appear comic for an instant and disquieting the next. Familiar ceramic conventions survive only as traces beneath forms that seem to possess their own bodily logic. Abstraction becomes a way of keeping identity unsettled rather than defining it.
Pleasure Spread places these practices together at the point where attraction becomes more complicated. Sabini intensifies the image until abundance begins to press back against the viewer. Wong transforms the vessel until function gives way to something creaturely. In both practices, ornament becomes consequential.
The exhibition’s title describes pleasure not as a fixed state but as something capable of spreading beyond its expected boundaries. It can become too much. That excess is precisely where Sabini and Wong locate the most productive tension of pleasure remains desirable even when it begins to implicate the body that experiences it.
SPECIAL PREVIEW EVENT
On Thursday, October 8, Oliva Gallery and Vagabond Art will present an intimate pre-opening collectors preview of Pleasure Spread. Designed for collectors, curators, art consultants, and press, the ticketed evening will pair the work of Sabini and Wong with a tasting experience developed specifically in response to the exhibition. Each artist will be represented through two signature drinks and two accompanying bites, creating four pairings over the course of the evening.
The approximately three-hour event will be limited to 35–40 guests. Tickets are $65 per person.
About Tara Sabini
Tara Sabini is a maximalist oil painter based in Chicago, IL. Sabini holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited at galleries across the country including Oliva Gallery, Purple Window Gallery, and ARC Gallery.
Recent residencies include Vermont Studio Center and Lillstreet Art Center. Sabini has been featured in New American Paintings and is also a recipient of the Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
About Jeremy Plotkin Wong
Jeremy Plotkin Wong is a Chicago-based performance and sculpture artist and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their interdisciplinary practice combines sculptural form, material experimentation, abstraction, and performance, often using playful visual language to engage questions of identity, perception, and power.
Wong’s sculptures have been exhibited through Chicago Sculpture International and at venues and platforms throughout Chicago and the Midwest. Their exhibition history includes Comfort Station, CSI Project Space, No Nation Art Lab, Mana Contemporary, Gallery 1922, and SAIC Galleries. Wong earned a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in ceramics and sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and entered the MFA program in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2025.
About Oliva Gallery
Oliva Gallery presents contemporary artists from Chicago, the Midwest, and beyond. Its exhibitions encompass painting, sculpture, mixed media, and interdisciplinary practices, with an emphasis on materially rigorous work and sustained engagement with the cultural and social conditions shaping contemporary life.
Contact:
Oliva Gallery
Email: olivagallery@gmail.com
Phone: (847) 922-5736