6 London Art Graduates to Watch in 2024

Fischer Mustin at Royal Academy Schools

Fischer Mustin exhibited his work in the inaugural Freelands Painting Prize open call while a student at Manchester Art School in 2020. Since then, he's moved on to the RA Schools and last year exhibited alongside Louise Giovanelli in Alice Amati's group exhibition, The Belly and the Guts.

Mustin's oil and tempera paintings emanate an almost neon glow from the walls of the newly renovated studios, and feature figures reminiscent of classical Greek and Roman sculptures in settings that merge earthly realms with alternate universes.

In Redeemer (2024), a nude male figure poses before classical architecture adorned with porticos and tiled flooring. The bright red monochromatic palette and linear perspective lend the image a surreal quality, giving the impression we are peering into a video game or virtual reality.

Other works on display include Cover me with dreams (2024), which depicts zombie-like figures wandering through a park square, and A match already struck (2024), showing a stoic woman with glazed-over eyes that match the amber tones of her skin.

Ruth Speer at Slade School of Fine Art

Discovering Ruth Speer's oil paintings of human-animal hybrids at Slade was a delight. Her paintings feature subjects resembling mythical creatures crossed with pensive humans, rendered in a style that embraces aesthetics from the Renaissance to the Pre-Raphaelite era.

The German-American artist works across painting and sculpture, creating what feel like portals into enchanting miniature worlds. Often housed in wooden structures, Speer's work relates to personal folktales and represents the interior life she cultivated while being homeschooled in rural areas of the east and west coasts of the U.S.

Since beginning her woodworking journey in January of this year, Speer herself has built almost all of the works showing at Slade.

The works range from wooden boxes adorned with close-up landscapes, portraits, and intricate gold-leaf detailing, to an arched structure with a spinning central panel activated by visitors turning a wooden handle. This panel depicts a half-horse, half-human creature chasing the tail of a half-dragon, half-human.

Rita Fernández at Royal College of Art

Mexican artist Rita Fernández exhibited a joyful 45-piece series of square miniature paintings, each measuring 10 x 10 cm, at RCA's Battersea campus.

Hung like the decorative tiles found in Mexican homes, these tiny works share the same dimensions as their ceramic counterparts. Fernández recreates their glossy texture by applying multiple thick layers of varnish over the paint.

Rendered in an emerald wash, the paintings depict interior scenes and distorted figures, drawing the viewer into the tiny stories they reveal from one to the next. Each piece functions like a journal entry with its own narrative and story, complementing its companions and the work's collective interpretation.

Later this summer, Fernández will exhibit in London at the LADRA Collective Exhibition hosted by Hypha Studios, a charity connecting creatives with vacant properties for free exhibition and studio spaces across the U.K.

Fungai Benhura at Royal Academy Schools

Born in Zimbabwe, Fungai Benhura has followed an unconventional path to the arts. After attending the RA's art and architecture programme for young people in 2010 and exploring various careers, he completed his BA at Camberwell College of Arts in London. In 2021, he returned to the RA to partake in their fine arts postgraduate programme.

Benhura's paintings emphasise the importance of viewing art up close. Their surfaces are richly textured, incorporating torn, collaged, drawn, and painted elements. These layers create a highly tactile experience, inviting viewers to engage with the intricate details and depth of the work, and showcasing Benhura's range of techniques.

His paintings—like distressed denim that is woven, dyed, bleached, and torn—emerge through a process of construction and deconstruction. Patches of vivid colour burst like sunlight through darker, heavily worked areas. Each rupture reveals a history of contours, marks, and layers, evoking an archaeological feel.

Rose Shuckburgh at Slade School of Fine Art

Rose Shuckburgh's textured work made a strong impression at the Slade show. Delicate and tactile, the British artist's work explores her personal connection and emotional response to place. She is fascinated by the energy of forms encountered in landscapes, seeing parallels between these shapes and the body.

Shuckburgh presented watercolours on handmade papers, a ceramic work made from crank clay, earth slip, and dolomite glaze, and floor pieces made of felted wool.

Her watercolours feature areas of bleeding ink and delicate, frayed edges, rendering abstract spaces undetermined by place or mass. Despite their stillness, her works are charged with emotion and memory.

The fluffy texture of the wool works echo the soft blends of colour in her watercolours, evoking a comforting aura that invited prolonged contemplation.

Ivana Vozelj at Royal College of Art

Ivana Vozelj's paintings are reminiscent of those by surrealist artist René Magritte.

Exploring the absence of presence through uncanny imagery, the Slovenian-born, London-based painter creates work imbued with mystery, nostalgia, and tension. Her deliberate exclusion of key details such as faces or identities encourages viewers to engage more deeply with her art, prompting them to fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Central to Vozelj's work are recurring characters and settings—most notably figures observing the sea, which represent manifestations of her subconscious mind.

Qui Venit, a painting of a figure pointing out to the sea, as though her arm were attached backwards, was particularly unsettling.

In the foreground, the contrast between the frothy white foam of crashing waves and a figure clad in a red suit is striking. The figure's face remains obscured by swirling hair, seemingly turned 180 degrees to gaze in the opposite direction, intensifying the disquieting nature of the scene.