Odile Kidd

Odile Kidd (b. 1971, Zimbabwe) is a painter and draughtswoman whose work centres on animals, natural history and the close observation of form. Working in acrylic, graphite, charcoal and mixed media, she often isolates her subjects against spare backgrounds, giving particular attention to anatomy, movement and individual character.

Kidd spent the first twenty-six years of her life in Zimbabwe and South Africa and studied at the School of Applied Art and Design at the Cape Technikon in Cape Town. She moved to Britain in the late 1990s, developing a practice that combined large-scale animal painting with increasingly detailed studies of specimens, skeletons and natural forms.

Her subjects have included macaws, zebra, polar bears, meerkats, chimpanzees, insects, butterflies and cetaceans. Earlier paintings were often made on a large scale, sometimes larger than life, with the animal dominating the composition. Kidd has described her concern as a search for feeling through close and faithful observation, using scale to heighten the presence and individuality of the subject.

Since 2018 Kidd has worked closely with Richard Sabin, Principal Curator of Mammals at the Natural History Museum, London. This collaboration has given her access to the Museum’s research collections and has led to an extensive body of drawings of cetacean bones, taxidermy, insects and fossils. Her work increasingly brings artistic observation into direct dialogue with zoology, anatomy and palaeontology.

A particularly ambitious strand of this work has involved detailed studies of whale anatomy, including a life-size pencil drawing of a sperm whale skull. In 2026 one of Kidd’s drawings, recording the original storage of an Indus River dolphin specimen, was included in the Natural History Museum display Sir Richard Owen: A Natural Legacy, where it was shown alongside historic scientific drawings and current research into the Museum’s cetacean collections.

Alongside her work with mammal collections, Kidd has also collaborated with specialists in palaeontology and geology on the study of crab evolution in the London Clay, extending her interest in natural history from living species to the fossil record.

Kidd has exhibited in group exhibitions including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Discerning Eye and exhibitions at the Zoological Society of London. She has also shown with Arthur Ackermann and has exhibited regularly with The Redfern Gallery, including in the gallery’s Summer Exhibition 2025.

Odile Kidd is represented by The Redfern Gallery.