Oliver Clegg's practice strikes a delicate balance between nostalgia and cynicism in his often witty commentaries on the dichotomy of past and present. Working across a wide variety of mediums, his choice of discipline tends to respond to the site or context for which it is created; his paintings are often highly refined with a Surrealist bent, where his sculptures are produced outside of studio, communicating a more conceptual repertoire.
Read MoreFor his first solo show in Berlin at Galerie Nolan Judin in 2011, Clegg meditated on the word berceuse—the French word for lullaby. The artist created seven painted works and a sculpture produced with found materials like demolished church floorboards, mirrors, and chess boards, engaging themes regarding dreams and the subconscious. The work Think of Me (2010) depicts a double self-portrait of the artist looking at and painted onto a mirror, where the viewer cannot see his face but instead the back of his head: an homage to René Magritte. The large-scale works proved Clegg's skills with high illusionism, replicating an almost Baroque visual style.
In 2016, Clegg held his first solo exhibition in the U.S.A. for Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, which featured ten oil-on-canvas paintings accompanied by three interactive sculptures that aimed to quite literally reproduce the dizzying effects of life in the digital age.
The paintings depicted traditional cartoon characters like Garfield and Mickey Mouse—'avatars' seemingly on the decline—in the form of deflated balloons to a trompe l'oeil effect. In dialogue with these new pieces, Clegg included Until the Cows Come Home (2014), a kinetic sculpture of a round table and chairs that spins manually every 20 minutes. In the first week of the exhibition, gallery visitors were invited to a series of interactive dinners and subjected to the vertigo that Clegg sees as symptomatic of the constant visual stimuli provided by our addiction to social media.
Clegg's 2021 exhibition We Cat for The Journal Gallery, New York proved his proclivity for creating distinct series of works focused on highly specific visual and conceptual motifs. As suggested by the title—punning on the messaging app WeChat—the show embraced cheeky and varied depictions of cats, ranging from high illusionism to cartoons to scribbles made by his young daughter, as in Luna (2021). Opening during Halloween, the exhibition was celebrated with a party thrown by the gallery, where the guests had to arrive dressed as cats to enter.
