Oliver Jordan's Biography

Born in 1958 in Essen, Germany, between 1980 and 1985 Oliver Jordan studied with Anatol Herzfeld, amongst others, at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and with Joseph Beuys at Free International University (FIU). Jordan was a frequent visitor to Essen’s Folkwang Museum even before graduating from secondary school, developing a particularly avid interest in the realist and expressive painting tradition, which he reinterpreted in a very unique way in total defiance of the zeitgeist of the art world.

His works are characterised by multiple layers of meaning, ranging from pencil drawings and oil sketches to rather more physical and to some extent monumental canvasses.

Common to all pieces is a contrastive dialogue between a precise, formalised structure and liberal, rhythmic deconstruction. Jordan gives his paintings a powerful, masterful treatment, creating multilayered, wall-dominating objects that, from close up, reveal abstract rivers of colour. At the same time his motifs project an astonishing visual presence, with an illusion lurking beneath the surface.

The impasto technique Jordan applies lends his paintings a sensual character in terms of both surface structure and colour.

Excerpt from a text by Marc Wellmann (translated from the German)
Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin
December 2013