white bread: Olivia Sterling

Cob Gallery is proud to present ‘White Bread’, a gallery exhibition of work by Olivia Sterling, and the inaugural exhibition in Cob’s tenth-anniversary programme focusing on artists whose work reflects the gallery’s core values, combining traditional media with distinctive and original new voices.

Born in Peterborough in 1996 and graduating from the RCA in 2020, Sterling has carved out a distinctive niche in using paint to address questions of blackness and whiteness in twenty-first century Britain. Her work in ‘White Bread’ presents scenes of colourful mayhem with a nostalgic twist and signature ‘slapstick’ style, combining joyous celebration with a subtle critique of racialised ways of seeing.

Using old photographs of parties and family cookbooks as starting points, the Day-Glo immediacy of Sterling’s zoomed-in canvases is full of human touch. Her paintings, at first glance, are as sinful a treat for the eyes as the cream-cakes and party snacks they depict. Daubs of bright colour and swooping, comic-book outlines create a sense of bigness and chaos extending beyond the frame.

This is true in both formal and thematic terms, since pigmentation in Sterling’s work is both hedonism and neurosis. In ‘White Bread’, her compositions allude subtly to the tradition of nineteenth-century political caricature, and in particular an 1819 example by George Cruikshank, ‘The New-Union Club’ – a toxic satire on the abolitionist movement in Britain, painted 14 years before the Emancipation Act was passed. This was a time when racist theories attempted to define and categorise gradations of skin colour into bizarre and obsessive hierarchies of identity and power. Sterling’s work sends up the absurdities of this obsessive compulsion to label and tag: letters marked onto her paintings point to the nearest block of colour, schematising pigmentation to the point of farce.

Blending pointed references like this into her depiction of ordinary scenes and subjects, Sterling’s work in ‘White Bread’ reflects on how we are confronted by racialised discourse everywhere in the everyday. Even happy or anodyne spaces are encoded with structures of othering and difference; every object, every skin tone, is assigned its place in a drama that continues beyond the edges of the canvas.