Olly Fathers
b. 1987, United Kingdom
Based in Brixton, London, Olly Fathers constructs works with wooden veneers, using this medium to explore the effects of scale, shape and colour on his audience. Aside from his interest in these formal qualities, he will often delve conceptually deeper, addressing and recontextualising historically significant philosophical questions. Despite the ostensibly high brow nature of these interrogations, he always retains a sense of play and simplicity, encouraging the viewer, through the puzzle like aesthetic of his work, to contemplate variations of the composition before them.
Modernist architecture, the flow of public traffic in built-up cities, and early computer technology are notable influences on Fathers' geometric abstractions. In this there is an intriguing contrast between form and content, as these arrangements are presented to the audience in the distinctly preindustrial and pretechnological guise of timber. The result is an aesthetic that is at once old and new, familiar and novel. Above all, Fathers practice is grounded in his obsession with − and indeed mastery of − woodwork, a practice with craft connotations but which, in his hands, becomes the vehicle for profound examinations of the human experience.
Fathers work has been exhibited in significant artistic institutions, including Saatchi Gallery, London, and he has partaken in various commissions of note, most recently for the collections of Soho House in London, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, and Mumbai.