DollyOlli produces playful, comic, colourful and complex large-scale sculptures that are often finished in bright colours. Their artwork explores difference and otherness.
They reject and refuse the current tastes of colour and seriousness in Western art, culture, and the public environment; challenging the ridiculousness of how serious our public spaces have become.
DollyOlli gives public buildings and environments personalities!
Wigan and London based, Marie and Olivier are DollyOlli. They have been working together for the better part of a decade, an artistic collaboration between the Conceptual Visual Artist, Marie Brenneis and Organic Sculptor and Designer, Olivier Adam. While Marie designs the gestures and colours, Olli focuses on character animation and craftsmanship.
DollyOlli’s mission is to inject playfulness into urban public spaces in need of a little TLC. Their vibrant pop aesthetic, characterised by an impulse towards humour and the carnivalesque, is embodied in their public sculptures. By bringing playfulness and interaction back into urban spaces, Dollyolli’s art inspires audiences to consider the ways in which sterile urban designs increasingly conditions our visual freedoms and imaginative potential.
DollyOlli choose living in colour and in a playful environment.
Previous Works
Notable artworks include large-scale character commissions such as Monster and Friendly Fish (both 2015-17) - sculptures installed in the entrance foyers of Coville Mansions and Mira House in East London respectively. An eye-catching, abstract, pink painted glass fish with exaggerated yellow lips, Friendly Fish is easily recognisable in its comical aesthetic to anyone familiar with DollyOlli’s work. Monster is a strong example of the duo’s ‘immersive furniture’, and was also exhibited as part of Get Living London. In 2015 and 2016, Hairy - a fur covered chair with animal feet made from silicone rubber, wood and foam - featured in the Comi-con worldwide exhibition. Most recently, the duo designed and created a sculpture for Piccadilly’s Golden Square in 2020. The result, an amusing concrete and gloss painted character sculpture of a green worm, titled Lockdown; that one imagines provided much needed light relief to Londoners taking a walk amidst a global pandemic.