A New York-based artist specializing in figurative work that explores how individuals inhabit and navigate physical and psychological spaces. His practice approaches space as a dynamic environment shaped by trauma, power, intimacy, and self-presentation, with an emphasis on the way people respond to these conditions, whether through detachment, performance, confrontation, or the impulse to leave. Underlining these responses is a persistent sense of desire.
Ott works primarily in figurative painting and drawing. His work functions as a form of commentary, using stylized figures to reinterpret and reflect on the world around him. He is interested in constructing a perspective and inviting the viewer into it, one that feels familiar, yet distinctly his own. The figures in his work are often people who serve as vessels through which he processes and reframes his observations. Rather than depicting specific individuals, they exist as recognizable types, allowing the work to move between personal perspective and shared experience.
Informed by a range of visual and cultural references, from contemporary figurative painting and popular media to ornamentality, performance, and constructed identity, his work considers how people assert themselves within the environments they inhabit. His practice is driven by tension, desire, ambition, and an insatiable appetite for more. He explores the conflict between stillness and movement, control and instability, as well as a mindset that is not content with what is given, but remains watchful, withholding, and constantly reaching for what lies just out of reach. This sense of dissatisfaction operates not as a purely negative force, but a relentless and omnipresent one, tied into ambition, pursuit, and a desire for anything immediately unattainable.
His subjects often appear composed or stylized, yet subtly convey separate experiences within the space they exist in. He is interested in figures who want everything from attention to experience and control, yet appear jaded, composed, or disinterested on the surface. This perspective is shaped in part by growing up within environments where luxury, performance, and excess coexisted with their opposites, informing his ongoing interest in class, image, and contradiction.
Visually, his work is defined through recurring motifs such as exaggerated eyes, lips, blush, and purposefully ambiguous captions or titles. The eyes speak to both an ambitious curiosity for what lies ahead and a disinterest in the present, however perfect it may be. The large lips and mouths explore an outspoken, however sometimes necessary, attribute often present in determined individuals, “closed mouths don’t get fed”. The sometimes blunt or enigmatical titles and captions provide a welcome interruption to the work through humor, directness, or ambiguity. Together, these recurring motifs add to the intensity between bright, stylized, and at times kitsch aesthetics and a deeper emotional complexity, allowing the work to be at its most sincere. Materially, Ott works across drawing and painting, regularly incorporating cutting, layering, and reassembly to build space within the piece. These processes reinforce the idea that identity and experience are not fixed, but built, performed, and continuously reshaped.