Artist Finds The Drug In The Paint

It’s a street scene in psychedelic colors, pointilism with an extra point, as though you’re walking down an urban street with your mind thoroughly altered. But If the overall composition of the painting looks familiar, that’s because it’s explicitly taken from Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting Paris Street; Rainy Day. The figures in that painting, however, are replaced with figures from contemporary pharmaceutical ads. The building in the background is the former Purdue Pharma building in Stamford. It’s the beginning of unpacking what artist Jeff Ostergren’s project is about.

The title refers to the red pill/blue pill lingo that began with the 1999 science-fiction movie The Matrix and has entered political lexicon. It also helped determine the palette of the painting in creating visual contrast. But the dots that make up the female figure are in the size and shape of pills directed toward women — birth control pills, estrogen. The male figure gets Viagra and testosterone pills. The idea: pharmaceuticals are everywhere, the water we swim in. They shape our daily lives. The questions involve how aware we are of that, and what our relationships to them are.

Ostergren — a 2023 awardee, along with fellow artist Linda Mickens, from the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists — happened upon the subject of making art about the pharmaceutical industry early, while he was in still in graduate school. ​“At that point I’d only been making art for a couple years,” he said. As an undergraduate he studied anthropology and gender studies, and did an internship at a contemporary art museum. He worked in museums for several years, sometimes as a guard, in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. He learned a lot about conceptual art and realized that ​“I can make things instead of just putting them on the walls.”

His first pieces were about the art industry itself: who makes money, who gets access to galleries and museums and who doesn’t. That was enough to get him into graduate school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Ca. There, ​“I was making a lot of pieces with found objects,” he said. That meant he was learning how to weld and use a wood shop. One of his pieces used a clock advertising the antidepressant Zoloft. ​“My mother-in-law,” who is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, ​“had given it to me as kind of a joke gift,” he said. She had gotten it at her office, presumably from a drug representative.

“So I put this clock in a sculpture,” he said. ​“I don’t even remember why,” aside from a general fascination with the advertisements for pharmaceuticals on TV, which ​“continue to be amazing to me … beautitful and strange, so structured and surreal, sometimes really banal.” But in his critique for the piece, ​“everyone went bananas,” he said, with ​“really strong reactions, both for and against.” Some people thought it was a critique of the pharmaceutical industry. Other people thought he was supporting it. Others revealed they were on Zoloft, and talked about how it helped them.

Ostergren had struck a nerve, and decided to ​“keep doing it.” He got more pharmaceutical swag from eBay. He downloaded drug commercials and manipulated their imagery. ​“The more I worked with it and talked about it,” he said, the more clear it became that ​“there was something there.” He started learning about the pharmaceutical industry and its ​“long connection” with art, and specifically paint, as both have involved chemical manufacturing. ​“There have always been connections, from pre-industrial times to the present,” he said. 

He came to appreciate that pharmaceuticals are ​“universal” in that ​“everybody has a specific relationship” to them, ​“whether you’re on them or avoiding them” — whether it’s medication for cholesterol, an antidepressant, or the Covid vaccines. Even the output of individual companies gets complicated; Pfizer is perhaps ​“overmarketing Viagra,” Ostergren said, even as it ​“saved millions of lives” through vaccines. ​“These companies are absolutely problematic, but they’re literally saving lives.” Ostergren seeks in his art to be about ​“both sides of that” and ​“the spaces in between.”

The color schemes of Ostergren’s paintings are designed to produce ​“bodily effects” in the viewer through the use of complementary colors. ​“I’m really interested in the idea that, whether you believe it or not, whether it’s romantic or not, art has a power to alter one’s state” — akin to pharmaceuticals. ​“I’m interested in playing with that.” But, as in Tristes Nootropiques, some of the decisions of which colors to use start with the colors of the pills themselves, or their branding and advertising. Once Ostergren has assigned colors to different drugs, he makes dots that are the size and shape of the pills, using templates that he makes himself.

The messiness around the edges is intentional, too. Ostergren’s approach ​“could be a marketing strategy for a pharmaceutical company.” He wanted to make sure he had a ​“separate approach from a corporate aesthetic,” and hearkened in turn to Expressionist painting, and the ​“element of chance” that creeps into the work. For Ostergren, that’s the way into the spaces in between.

With the grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund, Ostergren will take the process a step further; rather than working from existing pharmaceutical ads, he’ll collaborate with designers to create his own ads, and then turn those into a painting. ​“I’m focusing on drugs that are not advertised, but do exist,” he said — like abortion pills or medication for hormones for gender transition. ​“What would it be like if those things were freely advertised?” Ostergren asked, pointing out that it would be profitable for companies to do it — even as politics explain why they don’t. The ads will be done, he said, ​“with a really straight face … something like what a company would produce.”

In doing so, Ostergren hopes to open up questions about why, precisely, some drugs are advertised and others aren’t, and what the effects of that are, especially as they pertain to issues of race, gender, and class. ​“Certain things are advertised to certain populations and not others,” he said. Some drugs are ​“so targeted to a certain audience. What does it mean to reframe that for a different audience?”

By producing these ads, Ostergren points out, he’s implicating himself in the way that critics of the pharmaceutical industry blame it for its advertising. ​“I’m going to have to make the decision” about who is represented in the ads, who isn’t, and why. He’s hopeful that these open the doors to empathy, for the people being marketed to, and for the people who, under directives, are doing the marketing.

This moves Ostergren even further into the spaces between that he talks about. ​“Especially back in grad school,” but also in the intervening years since,“I was constantly told I had to take a position. You’re not allowed to take both sides, or it doesn’t make an effective work to take both sides.” But he remains more interested in the complexity of the problem, the questions it raises — which begin with the very word pharmaceutical.

“The origin of the word pharmaceutical is the Greek word pharmakon, and that word meant, simultaneously, ​‘cure’ and ​‘poison’ and ​‘paint.’ That really encapsulates it in this beautiful way. That really fits any kind of drug, no matter whether it’s good for you or not. The dosage matters. Too much of a good thing will kill you. Not enough of it can kill you.” The need to find the balance ​“is in the word itself. It echoes that double-sidedness.” And its connection with art has been there, all around us, from the beginning.