Grip Face Mirrors Modern Digital Anxiety With Fresh & Furry Artworks
In the mountains of northern Italy, far from his studio in Madrid, David Oliver was supposed to be resting. It was early 2025 and he had gone with friends to a house in the Dolomites on a retreat to disconnect. Instead, Oliver found himself staring at images on his phone of cities under bombardment in Ukraine and neighborhoods reduced to dust in Gaza. One particular image stayed with him: a bombed-out playground where only a single swing remained standing. “I couldn’t understand how human beings could fall into such depths of darkness as to destroy the innocence of childhood,” Oliver says.
Working under the name Grip Face, Oliver had built a career on indirection, using elements such as masks, mirrors, hair, and coded forms that suggest more than they seem. Seeing the lone swing was a shock. He was struck by its brutal immediacy and reminded of the sheer scale of devastation happening on the other side of Europe and the Middle East.
Left with “fear, incomprehension, and at the same time the urge not to stop denouncing the paths that are leading us toward a dark abyss,” the result became Oliver’s most explicit installation to date: Utopía del Lodo, Sashimi de Bruma (or Utopia of Mud and Sashimi of Mist), which opened last September at the Fundació Miró Mallorca in Palma. The installation filled the museum’s Espai Cúbic with twelve suspended sculptures: masked heads and playful objects— some fuzzy and hairy, others shiny and smooth—hanging from swings made not of rope but of thorns. Arranged in a circle that recalls the constellation of stars on the European Union flag, the swings hover motionless. The sweetness of childhood is still there, in each character’s cute expressions and funny shapes, though their light has dimmed. All the sculptures have their backs to the viewer. The space is hushed, and nothing is alive.
I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND HOW HUMAN BEINGS COULD FALL INTO SUCH DEPTHS OF DARKNESS AS TO DESTROY THE INNOCENCE OF CHILDHOOD …”
“I aimed for it to have a poetic quality, yet at the same time feel bittersweet. … Once again, we see how the law of the strongest prevails in a world in decline,” Oliver says of Utopía.
The exhibition punctuates an approach that has long defined Oliver’s work, of blending humor and whimsy with serious commentary. His imagery draws from graffiti, Japanese animation, ‘80s punk graphics, and other pop culture iconography. But they carry messages that reflect on hostility, anxiety, and society in disguise. “For me, life and work are deeply intertwined; everything is fluid,” says Oliver. “At times, I aim for the impossible: creating a space where seemingly antagonistic ideas coexist in equilibrium.”
Born in Palma in 1989 and now based in Madrid, Oliver grew up shy. He was more comfortable with paper and pencil than noise, spending most of his time at home drawing, watching animation, and reading comics. “That more intimate environment was fundamental, as it was where I developed my imagination and a very natural relationship with visual language,” Oliver says.
As a teenager, he discovered skateboarding, which carried him out of the house and into the street. Oliver began customizing the grip tape on his own board and those of his friends, which is where he picked up the moniker “Grip Face.” Around the same time, he started making art in public spaces and discovered a whole other universe of skate culture, fanzines, urban art, and the underground punk scene. “Although its origin was quite naive, over time [Grip Face] has taken on broader meanings that go beyond skate culture.”
The city offered Oliver a sense of community but also risk. In his early years painting outdoors, the artist wore a Mexican wrestler’s mask that had been given to him. “Initially as a form of protection,” says Oliver, whose introverted nature and shyness had evolved into social anxiety. The mask enabled him, giving Oliver the confidence to accomplish creative projects he might never have attempted otherwise.
THE MIRROR HAS BECOME A RECURRING ELEMENT IN MY WORK IN RECENT YEARS … TO ADDRESS ISSUES SUCH AS OVEREXPOSURE ON SOCIAL MEDIA, VISUAL SATURATION, AND DIGITAL ANXIETY …”
Over time, this mask grew from a practical tool into a central part of Oliver’s practice. It shaped the ideas he wanted to explore in his work. Wearing the mask, Oliver found a way to engage with themes that fascinated him by listening more closely to his instincts and imagination. “I came to understand that art had been both a balm and a tool for me,” he says. “A way to make sense of why I found it so difficult to adapt to an environment I often experienced as hostile, as well as to my own nature.”
That push and pull between exposure and secrecy, delicacy, and danger, still defines Oliver’s work. In Black Faces, a series the artist began in 2014 amid the Syrian migrant crisis, Oliver turned to obscured visages separating individuality and anonymity. Later exhibited at SC Gallery in Bilbao, these works feature colorful portraits of expressive faces peeking out from black hoods and balaclava-like wraps, their hairdos rendered in gleaming women’s bobs and exaggerated bouffants, suggesting unique personalities even as their identities remain concealed. Black Faces eventually became Oliver’s first book, documenting two years of street art he created in cities across Europe.
“I have certain obsessions that date back to my childhood, such as hair, mirrors, costumes … the first thing I began drawing was the hair I saw in comics—those graphic hairs that seemed like forms in themselves,” says Oliver. “My parents would take me to the local barbershop, and I would watch hair fall to the floor, forming patterns that resembled faces or masks, something like pareidolia, when you see faces everywhere.”
“I CAME TO UNDERSTAND THAT ART HAD BEEN BOTH A BALM AND A TOOL FOR ME …”
2016’s Doors Without a Destination saw Oliver reactivate boarded-up and abandoned doorways across Palma and later in Andratx by painting them with saturated color and slogans, as if reopening entrances the cities had sealed shut. Years later, he returned to deliberately eliminate his paintings, underscoring the fragility of public space and the temporary nature of intervention. Oliver’s doorways, while at first glance might appear purely decorative, revealed itself as a pointed meditation on the notion of access, exclusion, and who is permitted to move freely through a city.
Moving from murals to sculpture and installation, Oliver’s work as Grip Face explores the tensions between virtual identity and the physical world. The artist aims to speak to his generation, “a generation that experienced the last years of the analog world before the digital boom … My fascination with the digital realm coexists with influences from design, animation, and rendered worlds, while also engaging with more traditional sculptural and plastic materials, creating a unique atmosphere.”
In SAUDADE 01/158, Oliver’s second solo show at SC Gallery after Black Faces, a humanoid figure covered head-to-toe in long pink hair (think: Cousin It) lies on its back, knees drawn to chest. With feet resting on a raised wooden platform—perhaps pausing between a set of sit-ups? —a grinning squiggly face mounted on the wall watches like a mischievous trainer. Oliver blends tactile and absurd textures in this uncanny installation that examines the theatricality of self-improvement.
Another key work, “Network Mirror”, features a large spiky pink ball reminiscent of a naval mine sitting on a mirrored surface. On the reflection, a face overlaid with graffiti marks and light blemishes evokes the fractured, performative nature of online personas. Originally shown in the 2023 exhibition Find an Offline Shelter, a collaboration with Korean artist Miju Lee, this duo exhibition probed hyperconnectivity and personal freedom in a technologically saturated era.
“The mirror has become a recurring element in my work in recent years … to address issues such as overexposure on social media, visual saturation, and digital anxiety,” Oliver says. “[It] carries a strong introspective dimension: how I relate to mirrors, and my own contradictions as someone who does not like to expose my face, yet at the same time uses social platforms to share and promote my work.”
At ARCOmadrid with Galería MPA last year, Oliver brought a different type of contradiction to life, one both humorous and deeply human, with “De máscara a placebo insomne” (“From mask to sleepless placebo”), a phallic resin and silicone figure topped with a delicate pink sphere and balanced discs atop a flared base. Fuzzy hair covers the object like soft fur. Meanwhile a flat, tired face with a long drooping nose appears at its base. At once comical and melancholic, this boldly erect form is undercut by the seemingly underwhelmed, almost deflated expression at its core, capturing the gap that exists between public performance and private experience. In his work, “there is always a figure trying to confront both inner and outer fears.”
Oliver’s work spans the spectrum from the widescale horrors of global conflict to the intimate anxieties of life in an ultrafast digital age. “Anxiety has evolved over time, but I have never stopped experiencing it. It will live with me for the rest of my life,” he says. “The difference is that, through art, I have learned to manage it and to understand it.” In every mask, mirror, and sculpture, Oliver (re)imagines a reality where humor and vulnerability coexist, offering a space to broach both the world around us as well as the world within.*
This article appears in Hi-Fructose Issue 78. Get the full issue in print here.
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