Sydney Contemporary 2026: Derek Ogbourne, 6 years: from Lockdown to Upside-down Land

BCFA is thrilled to present a survey of Derek Ogbourne's painted works for Sydney Contemporary  Art Fair 2026 - ranging from his Lockdown Series of 2020 to the present day.

Derek Ogbourne describes his starting point for any new work as coming from what he calls “the basic condition of being lost”. That paradox of losing oneself in order to find inspiration is inherent to Ogbourne’s multi-disciplinary practice: “It’s important to be lost”, says Ogbourne, “then find your way again, even if it’s on the same route”.

Six years ago the Covid-19 pandemic threw us all into a collective state of being lost. Isolating in London, Ogbourne turned to painting (his “first love”) to create his Lockdown Series - works that embody the surreality and the physicality of that time. Atop grey ground, these paintings are inhabited by entities composed from visceral, organic elements: lumps of flesh; eyes and retinas; and the microscopic spectre of the spike protein.

There is a primal, telluric pleasure that Ogbourne takes in “the deliciousness of paint” as he works with it. In Lockdown, he began with paintbrushes, before he turned to squeezing paint straight from the tube, then manipulating it with his finger or his entire hand. “That sense of the actual substance of painting”, says Ogbourne, “excites me like it would do putting my hands in the mud”.

Ogbourne has painted for nearly fifty years. In his childhood he developed a “love of the physicality of paint”, recalling “the rich green and the redness, flesh-like” of watermelons that he painted from a Nancy Kominsky book he had received one Christmas. The love of paint led him to the Slade School of Fine Art and has persisted across his oeuvre from large organic paintings in the 1980s to more minimalist expressions in the 2000s.

Emerging from the pandemic, the grey backgrounds of Lockdown have been filled by surreal scenes from the artist’s mind. Dark, roiling seascapes like Sea One, 2023, reflect upon the artist’s fear of the ocean, and its capacity for tempestuous violence. His most recent paintings meanwhile, depict worlds that feel on the brink of calamity, like Dawn Where War Dwells, 2024, a painting of chaotic movement where passages of shadow, flame, light and colour flit across the surface in the midst of an otherworldly, hotly raging conflict.

Many of these paintings, for example All In Horizon, 2026, are built around a diagonal tilt, though it is only upon returning to his childhood home in High Wycombe after four decades in London, that Ogbourne understood why. From the window he saw “a triangular hill” that he realised has permeated his subconscious, embedding the diagonal in his mind. “In the diagonal opposite, it’s me as a child, looking beyond that. It’s around the hill; it’s my future.”

That connection between the artist’s past and future means there is always hope in Ogbourne’s upside-down lands. In Over and Over, 2026, rays of light appear to descend from a break in the clouds relieving a dark landscape, akin to a solar flare at the cold edge of space. And in Lushland Slip, Slide, 2026, those same light beams appear from on high, sustaining the life that grows below.

The past six years have seen our world endure disease, war and rising tides of mistrust and disunity. While Ogbourne is not a political artist, he is an astute chronicler of his personal reflections on contemporary events. These paintings are Ogbourne’s record not only of the world turned upside down, but also the beauty to be found in our hopes for the future, as we journey from hill to hill. 

-Jack Howard, 2026-