Artist: Olivia Sterling

Dirimart presents Jelly, Olivia Sterling’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her inaugural presentation in Istanbul.

Drawing on poetic traditions that associate muses with fruit, the exhibition reflects on the idea of the muse as a consumable source of artistic production. It brings together themes of fruit, love, and dark colour, situating these images within a framework that considers how they are transformed, fragmented and reconfigured through shifting power relations.

Through scenes involving food, the body, and stains, Sterling’s paintings appear playful and exaggerated at first glance, yet reveal underlying hierarchies, processes of objectification, microaggressions, and structural inequalities. The letters within the compositions extend beyond simple colour markers, forming a system that exposes how race is constructed through language and how arbitrary these classifications can be.

Centred on food, emotion, and colour, Sterling’s visual language traces how vivid, desire-laden hues – initially carrying a sense of positivity and intensity – are gradually manipulated, fragmented, and crushed. This process reveals how love and colour function not only as emotional expressions but also as ideological tools, showing how what is strong and abundant can be systematically weakened and reconfigured.

The title Jelly, as a conceptual and sensorial counterpart to this transformation, evokes flexibility, fluidity, and a bodily, almost grotesque structure, reflecting the fragile and shifting nature of identity, desire, and the body. The Turkish equivalent, Jöle, further extends the cross-cultural resonance of the title, positioning the exhibition as a metaphor for the dissolution of what is dense, the fluidisation of what is fixed, and the continuous reconfiguration of the body, desire, and colour within structures of power.