(British, b. 1990) Olivia Kemp is an artist and draughtswoman specializing in pen and ink. She creates intricate, highly detailed works that are often expansive, imagined, and surreal. Her compositions are complex, packed with a multitude of tiny, meticulously rendered details that coalesce into sprawling scenes without a single focal point. Many are based on places Kemp has known, transformed through memory and imagination into something entirely other.
Kemp earned her BA in Fine Art: Painting from the Winchester School of Art in 2011, and went on to complete The Drawing Year postgraduate programme at The Royal Drawing School in 2014. Since her Richard Ford Award residency at the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 2015, much of her work has drawn inspiration from art history and the great masters.
Kemp’s work has been widely exhibited in London and internationally, including at Christie’s New York, Buckingham Palace, and in galleries in Madrid and Provence. Her pieces are held in several prestigious collections, among them the Royal Collection (including the personal collection of HRH King Charles III), the Rothschild Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She was also commissioned by the Rothschild Collection to create a work based on the RIBA award-winning Flint House (2015).
She lives and works in the UK but travels extensively to seek new inspiration for her drawings.
