Oliver Marsden

Oliver Marsden is a British painter whose work seeks to represent the invisible, natural, and physical forces of sound, motion, energy, and gravity. He plays with the viewer’s perceptions of color, form, light, and space. His canvasses are imbued with a seductive resonant visual tension, that captures and holds the viewers’ gaze perfectly still while resonating a harmonious energy.

Marsden was born in Reading, UK, and studied at Edinburgh College of Art in the mid-nineties. It was here that he began exploring notions of “liquid reality”. Inspired by nature, biological structures, Morphogenesis, David Bohms’ “Implicate order”, Eastern philosophies, and contemporary music, his work achieved a psychedelic minimalism.

After art school, he lived in Miami and New Zealand before returning to Gloucestershire. Damien Hirst noted about Marsden, “Olly Marsden picks up the challenge and makes a kind of science of painting and creates pictures that have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op. They’re about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of a painting. They are like sculptures of paintings.”

Marsden’s works can be found in private and public collections, including: Jumex collection, Mexico; David Roberts Foundation, London; Horiuchi Collection, Japan; Kresge Art Museum, Michigan; Murderme Collection, London; Robert Devereux Collection, UK; Royal Bank of Scotland; St James Group, London; and The Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles.