Olivia Sterling

Olivia Sterling’s paintings turn a vivid, often playful eye on race, class, gender and domestic life – concerns that sit in pointed dialogue with Bloomsbury histories and mythologies of the home.Creating an entirely new body of work in response to this season, contemporary artist Olivia Sterling takes Quentin Bell’s lifelong fascination with magic, levitation and the occult as her starting point.

Working across painting, drawing and print, Sterling connects Bell’s world to our own — exploring how the language of spellcasting and mysticism operates in contemporary life and politics.

Her work is vivid and often darkly funny — finding the absurd in artificial intelligence, misinformation, political spectacle and the uncomfortable comedy of living through it.