OLIVIA PEAKE: FUTURGARDE

Olivia is a UK artist, and here she talks to FUTURE-ROCKER about her unique brand of Neo-Futurism.

I first started to get back into painting, having investigated different mediums in drawing, photo-editing, collage and textiles. I had gained a great interest in technology, having worked my ideas through photoshop and had a love for high intensive colours, manipulating hues, saturations and contrasts. 

I wanted to investigate how I could make my paintings interact with the ideas of new technology, and the modern lifestyle we see today. This is where the urban architectural structures and utopian virtual spaces began, and I started to produce my large-scale abstract paintings with fluorescent vibrant paint.

Olivia Peake: Futurgarde ( Painting One ), 2013

I am influenced by Greenberg, Fried and Douglas Fogle’s The Trouble with Painting, and the manipulation of painting to reform the canvas into a new hybrid form. Melting the edges of the restrictive canvas into three-dimensional form, light and installation and intervening within the architecture of the gallery space, to depict a metaphor for the collapse and re-development of painting itself.

Olivia Peake: Futurgarde ( Painting Two ), 2013

Further influences of mine were from movements within futurism and modernist abstraction: Utopian spaces that present a state of re-development and movement, reminiscent of the work of Julie Mehretu, Ian Monroe and Constant Nieuwenhuis' New Babylon. As intricate and complex as my paintings are, my work also follows minimalistic structures, taking inspiration for the work of Mondrian in the use of geometric forms and technological pixilation, and creating stark building structures with contrasting subtle reflections.

Olivia Peake: Futurgarde Installation, 2013

I develop my paintings by constantly editing, erasing, re-doing, and working through levels of improvisation and intuitive responses, combined with precision and decisiveness of perspective and forms. In a way my work is in a constant battle with itself, being manipulated from a wall based canvas to a sculpture, then to an installation. Conflicting responses between the virtual vs. actual, abstract vs. representational, from the plastic aesthetics of Perspex to the glossy reflective surfaces of paint.

Olivia Peake: Urban Dynamics, 2012

My work is always shifting and developing and has began to take influences in ideas of alter-modernism and the interventionist work of Katharina Grosse, and I am excited to know where it will lead next.

Olivia is currently living and working in Derby, UK, and further developing her paintings at a smaller scale and continuing to involve the use of installation and sculpture.

To purchase Olivia's work, click here

With thanks to Charlie Levine and Artfetch