Class of 2022
It’s been an inspiring few weeks for Anise Gallery visiting the fantastic student shows on offer across London. It’s brought back many great memories for us too, thinking back to past collaborations and getting us very excited for our upcoming graduate show next month (don’t miss it!).
Congratulations to all those exhibiting and on creating such fantastic work. Continue reading for a glimpse of just some of our highlights…
RCA2020
During their time as students at the Royal College of Art, the class of 2020 were unable to physically exhibit their work as a result of the pandemic. RCA2020 provided a space to celebrate the work of the 2020 cohort, showcasing their creations across physical exhibitions at the iconic Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf.
Beth Horner
MA Painting
In her small-scale paintings, familiar suburban settings are transformed into sinister, uncanny dwellings blanketed in mystery and quiet possibility. Personal and found imagery is compiled, disassembled, and pieced back together in claustrophobic, eerie documentations of domestic life.
Droop | Missing | Storm
Intricately rendered fragments lead into areas suggestive of decay. Plaster strips resemble scabs on the painting’s surface as if a result of intense scrutiny, warping and abstracting the spaces. The work often lingers in thresholds between day and night, inside and outside, safety and fear and the physical and the virtual.
Beth’s intricate works draw in the viewer, whilst also creating a feeling of intrusion as we enter these private spaces.
Maria Jacinta Silva Armstrong
MA Painting
Maria’s Archipelago Series were inspired by islands, with the image of isolation and solitude (a constant interest in her work) becoming more prominent during lockdown as an appropriate representation for the sensation she and others were experiencing.
Paintings of islands that would otherwise be places on their own are joined together with stitches to create archipelagos, each with a silk wrapping as its own incorporated protection. The resulting works create a network of islands, delicately attached, each with its own individuality, separate but in close proximity to others.
Min Kim
MA Visual Communication
As an important statement in our contemporary society, Dear Daughter is a visual manifesto that all daughters in the world can participate in, to deliver what they want to say to their future daughters.
This includes sentences that limit our pattern of behaviour as a woman, as a daughter.
By collecting participants’ experiences and converting those sentences as positive sentences with variable typeface, it aims to comfort and encourage all the daughters who live in the past, present and future.
Central Saint Martins
Kate Winning
BA (Hons) Textile Design
Kate Winning’s Light Trails were inspired by the contrast between the strong and unmoving architecture that makes up a city, and the flowing movement of light in and around the various buildings.
The fabrics are woven with fluorescent yarn so that, when exposed to different coloured lighting, the colours are intensified and the patterns change dramatically.
Eleni Maragaki
MFA
Eleni Maragaki is a visual artist from Athens, Greece. Her practice involves the examination of the structure, system and materiality of the geometric form in its natural and artificial state.
With the observation of cities at the core of her work, she is often inspired by the delicacy found in the system of natural structures, including chemical elements and crystals as a response to the densely manufactured urban space.
Objects are handmade to precision striving to get as close as possible to a manufactured result, thinking critically about the mechanical precision in contrast to the imperfection of the human touch.
Eleni’s process involves continuous tests, trials and errors through the creation of large-scale drawings, considered as part of the final work.
Slade School of Fine Art
Boon & Baum
MFA Sculpture
Boon & Baum is the collaborative duo of Joe Boon and Anna Baumgart, currently studying an MFA in sculpture together. Previously graduating from Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins, they draw upon their fashion background, employing the language of fashion to experiment with notions of ‘dressing’ and ‘wearing’ in relation to ideas of ‘the individual’ and ‘the community’. Using clothing and textiles as their main medium they work with performance, video and architectural intervention.
Eleanor Turnbull
MFA
Paper Puddles are the physical manifestations of the project, Lonely Puddles, an archive of water-bodies and their journeys to the sea. The project began by directing puddles how to get to the nearest sea, and has since become an international collection of water-bodies, equipped with intentions to meet.
Semiramis Kashef
MFA
Semiramis Kashef is an architect and contemporary visual artist based in London. Spanning paintings and installations, her multidisciplinary practice engages with architecture to create experiential spaces, creating ‘Artitecture’.
The Royal Academy Schools
Each year, the RA Schools Show is an opportunity to see the results of three years of intense study, research and experimentation, and this year, having completed their postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools, 15 artists transformed their studios into exhibition spaces to present new work across a range of media.
The exhibition included paintings that layered tradition with augmented reality, a landscape of sculptural wishing wells, a performance where slow bodies melt into screens and machines, and photographs that capture people and places with a directness that frequently summon the mythological and quietly psychological.
Hannah Lister
Amongst the works, Hannah Lister’s analogue photography capturing subtle, ambiguous and symbolic moments in the play of everyday life, brought a delicacy and quiet to the exhibition, as though a retreat amidst the busy-ness of central London.
Pascal Sender
Besides creating masterful paintings, Sender has created an innovation so that the pictures can be viewed in Augmented Reality. When viewing his paintings through a phone camera, another digital perspective is revealed. The paintings jump off the canvas appearing as three-dimensional forms, his characters moving and interacting with the viewer. This breakthrough in new media art presents a unique reflection of modern life, and add a further dimension to the works that goes beyond the traditional gallery experience.
Apparent throughout the exhibitions is the students’ drive to create work with tangible social and environmental impact, as a direct response to the challenges they have faced. Across the graduate shows, these issues have been addressed with both sensitivity and determination, explored with innovative technologies and through skilled practice.
2022’s graduate shows have communicated a promising future for these students, and we should be very encouraged by this emerging generation.
There was so much to see, but there’s yet more highlights to come at our Graduate Exhibition opening in August.
Watch this space for further details!
