Oliver Barratt was born in 1962 and studied at West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham (1979-80), North East London Polytechnic (1980-81) and Falmouth School of Art (1983-85). He was Henry Moore Fellow at Kent Institute of Art and Design (1990-92), which resulted in his first solo exhibition at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, in 1992. He has had one-man…
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Oliver Barratt was born in 1962 and studied at West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham (1979-80), North East London Polytechnic (1980-81) and Falmouth School of Art (1983-85). He was Henry Moore Fellow at Kent Institute of Art and Design (1990-92), which resulted in his first solo exhibition at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, in 1992. He has had one-man shows virtually every year since then in London, Kent and Somerset, and has participated in many group exhibitions, including an Arts Council show with Patrick Caulfield organised by the Hayward Gallery in 2001.
Barratt taught successively between 1986 and 1997 at CARE, a home for adults with learning difficulties, Kent Institute of Art and Design, Camberwell School of Art, Wimbledon School of Art and Sevenoaks and Byham Shaw Schools, London. He has working to commission since 1988, with patrons and supporters including Fuller's Brewery, Eastern Arts, National Power, Unilever plc, Chadbourne and Parke, the New Art Centre, Richard Rogers, Jane Miles, James Cazalet and Cardiff Bay Arts Trust. One of his sculptures forms the Everest Memorial. Placed at the base camp of Mount Everest in Nepal in 2002, it commemorates the lives of 150 climbers who have died on the mountain.
Many things contribute to Oliver Barratt's work: a long mental list, he says, of everything that feeds the conception and realisation of a sculpture. He returns time and again to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, who he believes had the ability to transform a fleeting moment into something rich and resonant, or something deeply melancholic into a state of grace. Such transformations take place in his art - the making being a process of loosening a form from its origin, whether a half-remembered story, one shape drifting into another, a surface that belies another meaning. Barratt writes of his sculptures: 'They are elegant and clear, tense and lithe, simple and essential, quiet and enigmatic. Forms are paired down, on the fringes of minimal, but retaining a romantic, emotional sincerity.'
