Oliver Bak, Swarmers (day), 2025, oil and wax on canvas, 123 × 127 cm; Swarmers (night), 2025, oil and wax on canvas,174 × 224 cm, Inverting Metamorphosis, 2025, oil and wax on canvas, 182 × 197 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sprüth Magers; photograph: Giorgio BenniKnown for his murky paintings laden with illuminative potency, Oliver Bak’s true skill lies in the way he summons formal emergence and commands emotional gravity within his figurative abstractions. In his pictorial logic, time always supersedes place. His solo show, ‘Swarmers’, at Indipendenza in Rome sees the gallery’s interior – a former apartment featuring eroding ceilings, faded walls and mosaic marbles in subdued blues and browns – creep into Bak’s tableaux in fragments and flux, setting his surfaces abuzz with eerie vitality.
Located in the city’s historical ‘Macao’ district, the exhibition finds Bak animating the temporality of decay before sedimenting it in perfect stillness. In Inverting Metamorphosis (all works 2025), a swarm of grey figures appear to merge and trespass into one another, before entering a field of grey precipitation at the bottom of the canvas – or rather, before resurrecting to the top of the suspended levitation, overturning the cycle.Each mark swings between obfuscation and delineation. In Descenders II, wilting figures drift towards the foreground through a creamy haze. Faceless and spectral, their spineless bodies – painted with colours suggestive of flesh and wounds – sway with their bruised and fading limbs. Working at the threshold of disappearance, Bak occasionally treats his canvas as a palimpsest, scraping the old to make room for the new, where the remains of a past are subsumed – if not consumed – by what follows. The diptych Butterfly Composition depicts a pair of dancers shoulder to shoulder, arms outstretched like wings. Rendered in diffuse magentas and reds, the composition appears ablaze against the gallery’s peeling red chinoiserie wallpaper. With scarlet flames pouring down around them, the figures seem to smoulder, their muted skin relinquishing legibility into a layered oblivion.
Moth Head captures a stillness amid an agitating silence. Loose white strokes spread across a severed head on the ground. Yet it appears to sprout: veins unfurl into stems, skin into soil, before crystallizing into a glistering foil that engulfs the entire painting.
Oliver Bak, Butterfly Composition, 2025, oil and wax on canvas, each 166 × 86 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sprüth Magers; photograph: Giorgio BenniWithin this atmosphere of existential dread and ennui, Bak allows a rare glimmer of hope, which might just look like the moths encircled by halos and enmeshed in the weeds of Swarmers (night). As one draws closer to this nocturnal reverie, its opaque darkness dissolves into a boundless field of deep greens and ultramarine specks, surging ashore puddles of flickering life – quiet yet lucid – that gaze back at us.
Oliver Bak’s ‘Swarmers’ is on view at Indipendenza, Rome, until 17 January 2026