About

Olivia Lennon (b. 1988, Australia) graduated from Sydney’s National Art School in 2010 with an Honours in Printmaking. Her practice spans painting, installation, and performative lectures. 

Each body of work is the result of research into a different theme; from mythologies around chthonic ritual, the epistemology of airborne disease, fascist aesthetics in relation to ‘Fortress Europe’, resource extraction and social futures in outer space, to the impossibility of mapping the topography of the universe. 

As disparate as these themes seem on the surface, they all illustrate Lennon’s desire to render an invisible object (a person, thing or event), visible. This desire is reflected in Lennon’s use of interference and colour-shifting watercolour pigments, which from different angles refract light in varying intensities and shades. This shifting encourages the viewer to reposition themself, and seek out colours and forms not initially discernible. The forms are hand painted with fine sable brushes, sometimes using as few as two or three hairs at a time, resulting in an exactitude that resembles digital printing. The totality of the works become difficult to understand visually in-person, and awkward to reproduce photographically. Lennon’s titles further allude to these layered themes, often exploiting the poetics of etymological word play.

In 2022 BBA Gallery presented Lennon’s solo survey exhibition ‘Outer Spaces’, curating works from across Lennon’s practice that drew out the recursive ideas of permeable and shifting borders across the body, national borders, the earth’s atmosphere and outer space. BBA has also represented Lennon at SWAB Art Fair (Barcelona), Sluice Exchange (Berlin) and C.A.R. Art Fair (Ruhr). 

Lennon currently lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia), on lands unseeded by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation.  

olivia@olivia-lennon.com

IG: olivia.concetta.lennon