Saskia Olde Wolbers was born in Breda, Netherlands in 1971. She settled in London after studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Exhibiting regularly throughout the UK and internationally, she works primarily in video, creating short narrative films which blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, oscillating between representation and abstraction, and subverting the truth-telling qualities of the medium of film; she has also held many teaching posts in UK art education institutions.
Artist Saskia Olde Wolbers was born in Breda, Netherlands on 25 May 1971. In 1989-90 she undertook a Foundation course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, returning to the Netherlands to study for a BA in Fine Art at the Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, which she was awarded in 1994. From 1996-97 she returned to England, completing an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
Olde Wolbers held her first solo exhibition at the Cross Currents Gallery 291, London in 1998. Since then, she has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally, including her solo exhibitions Lightbox, as part of Art Now Film & Video presented at Tate Britain (2003), The Falling Eye at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2006), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008), Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany (2010), A Shot in the Dark at Vienna Seccession (2011). In 2014 her video piece Yes, these Eyes are the Windows was exhibited as a site-specific installation at Van Gogh’s House in Brixton, south London, in association with Artangel, the arts organisation which commissions and produces ambitious site-specific works. The installation was shown subsequently at Foundation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France and at Stigter Van Doesburg Gallery, Amsterdam in 2016. Recent group exhibitions/screenings in England have included Twixt Two Worlds, Whitechapel Gallery and Towner Gallery, Eastbourne in 2014, Folds in Time: Artists’ Responses to the Temporal and the Uncanny, conference held at the Freud Museum, London in 2015; Our Machines, at the Observer Building Gallery, Hastings, in 2016, and Towner International at Towner Gallery, in 2020. She has been awarded an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts, as well supported by funds from the Mondrian Fund and the Elephant Trust. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Charlotte Kohler Award (2002), Beck’s Futures Award (2004), London Artists' Film and Video Award (2007), RSA Goldsmiths University award and the Breathing Space Award (2016). She has been invited to give talks and discussions relating to her Artangel project at the Type Archive London, Tate Britain, and the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. She has served on several selection committees, including for Blink at Gasworks, London (2006) RCA Metro Prize (2013), and East Sussex open (2015).
Since the mid-1990s Olde Wolbers has worked with video. Her short narrative works combine carefully crafted fictional scripts with visuals that reveal other-worldly environments. Off-screen narrators address the fluidity of fact through biographies relating to notions of translation, neurosis and verisimilitude, with an eye for wit and the absurd. Referencing computer-generated imagery, her liquid visuals are entirely analogue, shot in real-time in model sets. Skeletal objects, architecture and living forms are given a 'skin' when dipped in paint and submerged underwater. Materials are animated through this unpredictable confrontation of oil and water and become dripping, oozing and undulating matter, oscillating between representation and abstraction. These recordings of sculptural and chemical lo-fi processes subvert the truth-telling qualities of filming reality. Her videos incorporate soundtracks composed by Daniel Pemberton, who is well known for creating an inventive hybrid of musical media – from electronic to orchestral – throughout his work in film and television. In the process of editing the music, scripts, and visuals together, and by presenting the finished works on a loop, Olde Wolbers creates a circular time structure that utilises an unfamiliar and new cinematic space.
Since 2003 Olde Wolbers has also taught at various art education institutions, including Chelsea College of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, Camberwell College of Art & Design, Royal College of Art & Design, Westminster University (all London) and Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Since 2013 she has been a Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Living and working in London, she is represented by Maureen Paley, London and Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam. Works by Saskia Olde Wolbers are held in public collections in the UK, including Contemporary Arts Society and South London Gallery in London; collections abroad include: Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany; Stedelijk Musuem, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C, USA.