Olivia Martha (b.1998, Belgium) is a Dutch-Curaçaoan artist based in London, currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, after graduating from Camberwell BA Fine Art in 2024. Her practice constructs speculative visual spaces that function as evolving systems of thought, where imagination unfolds through an interplay of structure and fluidity.

Rejecting the conventions of surrealism, Olivia does not seek to depict dreams or psychological landscapes. Instead, her work is a rigorous exploration of how imagined structures evolve, interact, and exist on their own terms. Forms shift and reconfigure across multiple works, engaging in an ongoing dialogue that resists fixed meaning.

 

Through intricate compositions, contrasting textures, and dynamic spatial arrangements, her paintings and drawings function as sites of speculation. They are thought-ecosystems that challenge the boundaries between the organic and the constructed, the intuitive and the systematic.

Olivia’s practice is rooted in iteration, allowing each work to become a fragment of a larger, ever-expanding system. Imagination is not a means to an end but an active force that continuously generates and reconfigures itself. In this process, her work does not seek resolution. It embraces the unknown, inviting the viewer into a world where meaning is in perpetual motion.