With multiple shows and hundreds of artists where do you start? Well-curator & writer Anna Moss gives you a start with her 7 London Art Grads to see at the shows.
With most of the graduate shows fast approaching, I wanted to highlight some of the London Grads I have met this year who have captured my attention and offer a more in-depth insight into their practice. Keep your eyes peeled for these talented newcomers!
City and Guilds of London Art School
City and Guilds is an outlier amongst other arts universities for its independent status and specialist nature, granting students enviable studio space and a high teacher-student ratio. Though their output is perhaps more orthodox (first-year students have to do weeks of intensive, 9-5 life drawing) two students sharing a space, Alice Delhanty and Ted Mckenzie, are leaving their mark on the institution and emerging circuit.
DelHanty’s large-scale paintings are exuberant, with a knack for high-key colour and intuitive brushstrokes: her recent work Set is a triumphant choreography of both. Her palette and painterly force is reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin.
More understated, but by no means less powerful, Mckenzie’s paintings contain within their small scale the immense power of shape. His works are well-worked and layered in the best sense, creating a densely textured painterly surface. Geometric formations appear to spontaneously emerge, dance, and float between his planes of colour in a rather magical fashion.
Although outwardly different, it is easy to see the dialogue in both the studio and the artwork as the duo find their voices in abstraction. DelHanty already has a promising exhibition history, having been selected for OHSH projects’ most recent South Open, and Mckenzie was recently nominated by tutors at City & Guilds for this year’s New Blood Prize.
City and Guilds BA Fine Art Degree show: 22nd-28th June. MA Fine Art Degree Show: 9-14th September.
Chelsea, UAL
Keisuke Azuma, is a Japanese painter whose elegantly washed, often tea-stained canvases are characterised by chiaroscuro. His compositions strike a delicate balance between spontaneity and controlled movement, rendering wonderfully emotive and abstract landscapes. Standing in front of his large-scale work in a bustling stairwell on Chelsea’s campus, I find a quiet moment. Surrounded by swathes of ink blue and sharp, vertical lines, there’s always a clearing: a beam of undulating light that centres and grounds the viewer.
A caution to not overlook the Grad Diploma, German artist Ben Grosse-Johannboecke creates hybrid-paintings using satellite and archival imagery with often violent connotations; the Russia-Ukraine war being one. He repeats and refracts this source imagery ad infinitum, working with aluminium wire and grids, creating an emotional and physical barrier to the image. Grosse-Johannboecke’s printing-making processes feel Warholian or Rauschenbergian, but with contemporary references and greater perceptual difficulty. His often amber-hued works have the appearance of corrugated glass and the faintest traces and impressions of images beautifully escape easy revelation. I admire how even with found imagery, Grobe-Johannboecke’s innate flair for intricate pattern and mark-making allow him to pose a visual and ethical challenge.
Azuma and Grosse-Johannboecke were both recently exhibited in Wood Wide Web, curated by Vittoria Beltrame at Great Western Studios.
Chelsea UAL BA Fine Art Degree Show and Grad Dip degree show: 6th-15th June Postgraduate Fine Art Degree Show: 1-6th July
RCA (MA Painting, Sculpture, Contemporary Art Practice)
The insular network of the RCA across its painting, contemporary art practice, sculpture, and more recently, curation courses, means the student body has ample resources to pool together ambitious self-organised exhibitions such as Travelling Memories, Transitional Traces and Body Songs. The prospect of picking a Grad to Watch from the postgraduate MA painting course, which has over 120 students, unsettles me: it is a course with a reputation for propelling some of its graduates into galleries, yet many get lost in the ether. In this instance, I’ve chosen to turn my attention to another department.
Hongxi Li is a sculpture student whose integrated practice is making big waves. ‘YES YES YES’(2023) is an absurdly funny performance piece, told through her character of Jolene, on systemic injustice, authority and power dynamics, based upon the artist’s personal experience growing up in the Chinese school system. At the centre of the performance is an L-shaped office desk (with an emergency button!) immaculately cracked and verging on collapse – an effect Li has gone to great lengths to create without actually breaking the table. The state of the desk foreshadows the surreal chain of events about to ensue, as Li’s head rests face-down, her hand trembling and grasping for the emergency button.
What is impressive about Li’s work is the ambition and magnitude of her projects: they encompass not just sculpture and performance, but design in almost every art form. In creating minutes of dramatic tension, painstaking hours have been spent in the studios sparing over details. Her work feels as cutting-edge and as polished as the enormous steel ruler she arms her fictitious persona with.
Hongxi Li was selected for New Contemporaries in 2022. I first discovered Li’s work at ‘Funny Dread’ at Set Ealing, curated by Laura Sutton and Francesca Dobbe.
RCA2024: 20th June – 4th August. School of Arts & Humanities postgraduate exhibitions and events (including MA Painting, Sculpture, Contemporary Art Practice): 20th – 23rd June
Slade School of Fine Art, UCL
Georgia Brady-Tompt’s modular sculptures caught my eye at the Slade’s degree show. Towards the start of her degree, Brady-Tompt’s practice was principally in painting: somewhat cyclically, her sculpture practice now interrogates this very medium. I spot a timber ‘easel’ with drone propellers, and shimmering vinyl floor samples bolted in next to picture frame hooks. A self-confessed hoarder, the artist scours both the street and the depths of E-bay to find her components: I love how these seemingly disparate parts come together so harmoniously.
When viewed all together, you can really see the artist’s exercise in patience, and her careful navigation of the utilitarian and aesthetic. This comes through in the meticulous installation – even the ceiling fan, which is near impossible to see as it moves so fast, has been switched out and designed by the artist.
Slade Degree Show 2024 Graduate showcase
Camberwell UAL
Olivia Delacour is a Belgian-British multidisciplinary artist, who fuses her practice with an avid interest in science, religion and technology. Her paintings, explosive and rhythmic, render a multitude of natural and supernatural forms: lightning, plasma, ghosts and spirits, of which Invisible Infrastructure is an arresting example. Delacour uses electric currents and chemicals like iodine and bleach, alluding to the tradition of auto-destructive art as well as her own subject matter.
Delacour’s sculpture practice explores an interest in quantum computers through the lens of divinity, appropriating religious symbolism and even showing one in a Medieval hall. When seeing work by young emerging artists, one of my concerns is often that even with great technical skill, they might need to expand their influences: to find inspiration, borrow and steal more widely. With young guns such as Delacour, whose practice draws parallels between almost every field, this is of no worry.
Camberwell UAL BA Fine Art: 10th-15th June MA Fine Art: 1-6th July
