Oliver Bedeman Exhibition

Completing a Foundation Course at Wiltshire College, and a Degree in Painting at Brighton University, Oliver went on to The Royal Drawing School, where he won the Lady Rothermere Award. He then had a years’ residency at the school and taught on their outreach program. Selected for the 2016 Columbia Threadneedle Prize at the Mall Galleries, London his painting toured with the prize to the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. His most recent showing this autumn was at The Fine Art Society in London.

The paintings have a spacious and dream-like quality tempered by the artist’s keen observations on urban life. Suspended between fiction and reality, he creates worlds, in which saints take the underground and fictitious characters, drawn from music and literature, are reimagined in the city.

Observational drawings made in and around London are later worked up into paintings in the studio where imagined spaces are combined with figures, patterns and fields of colour.

Each picture builds on pictorial and literary references that Bedeman collects from sources that stretch from poetry to his artistic influences from Klimt to Bonnard.