Olivia Sterling (born 1996 in Peterborough, United Kingdom) is a British painter known for her bold, vibrant style and conceptually rich paintings that explore themes of race, embodiment, consumerism, and everyday culture. Her works are filled with humor, visual metaphor, and exaggerated gestures—using figuration not just as a means of representation but as a tool for critical commentary. Sterling challenges visual stereotypes and questions how bodies and identities are portrayed in contemporary society.
She completed her BA in Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 2017 and went on to receive her MA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2020. Since then, her practice has quickly gained recognition. Sterling’s work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the UK and internationally. While visually engaging and often playful, her paintings are underpinned by a sharp social awareness and an ongoing interrogation of cultural and racial coding in visual culture.
Sterling’s compositions frequently depict cropped, disembodied fragments—arms, hands, legs, lips, patches of skin—rendered in a flat, almost cartoonish aesthetic. These body parts interact with messy or absurd scenarios: dripping condiments, smeared desserts, greasy hands. The recurring presence of food—often brightly colored, mass-produced items like donuts, ketchup, or frosting—serves as a metaphor for overconsumption, identity politics, and social anxiety. Her works often contrast light and dark skin tones in a manner that draws attention to ingrained racial perceptions and the absurdity of binary categorization.
A defining feature of Sterling’s work is her use of humor and irony. She avoids moralizing or didacticism, instead using playful imagery to raise deeper questions. Her paintings resemble cartoons or pop visuals but are layered with critical commentary on race, class, and representation. By excluding facial features and full bodies, she abstracts identity to challenge viewers to think beyond individual portraiture and consider broader visual codes and cultural assumptions.
Sterling’s work has emerged within a broader movement of young Black British artists addressing representation, visibility, and the decolonization of image-making. Her paintings are frequently situated within conversations about how Black bodies are consumed, judged, and framed in both art and daily life. At the same time, her aesthetic choices—flat color planes, thick outlines, and saturated palettes—invite viewers in with immediacy and familiarity, making her work accessible yet deeply subversive.
Now based in London, Sterling continues to build a compelling body of work that is as visually dynamic as it is socially engaged. Her practice speaks to a generation of artists reimagining the boundaries of figurative painting, using humor, discomfort, and visual excess as tools for critique. Sterling's paintings don’t offer easy answers—they provoke, complicate, and open space for dialogue around how we see and interpret identity in an image-saturated world.
With a sharp eye and fearless approach to subject matter, Olivia Sterling has quickly established herself as one of the most relevant and thought-provoking voices in contemporary British painting.
