London Graduates 2023:
Young Artists to Watch
As summer rolls in, London's MFA courses come to an end and graduate exhibitions open across the capital.
We expect Royal College of Art, whose graduate exhibition we'll be covering in July, to produce a handful of painters who are quickly scooped up by top galleries. At Slade School of Fine Art and Royal Academy Schools, however, it was apparent that while painting remained popular, young artists were more engaged with sculpture and conceptual-based presentations compared to previous years.
That might come as a relief to some, including critic Jerry Saltz, who recently bemoaned the ubiquity of 'painting fairs'.
Here, we've chosen six graduates from Slade and the Royal Academy—including painters, draftsmen, and sculptors—to watch this year.
Clark Keatley at Royal Academy Schools
The subjectivity of Clark Keatley's carbon pencil on paper sketches was the real draw of Royal Academy Schools' graduate exhibition.
One drawing captured a figure sitting at her desk, playing with a rubix cube, with a fountain pen sitting upturned in a pot of ink. In another, a woman perches on top of a bench, playing with a piece of string in what looks to be a game of cat's cradle.
The drawings ask more questions than they answer, yet the detail and chiaroscuro with which they are drawn creates striking compositions that are both charming and strange.
Prior to completing his MFA, Keatley studied at Camberwell College of Art, London.
Shaan Bevan and Cheuk Yiu Lo at Slade School of Fine Art
While not technically a joint presentation, the juxtaposition of Shaan Bevan and Cheuk Yiu Lo's displays in a light-filled atrium was a highlight of Slade's graduate show.
Shaan Bevan can be credited for the exquisitely framed pencil and paper works running along the back of the curved exhibition space. The calming ripples of her detailed seascapes become more treacherous as the viewer moves clockwise around the room, transitioning from a calm millpond to a brooding swell.
Drawing is a therapeutic tool for the California-born artist who uses art to process her personal experiences of disease, trauma, and bodily transformation.
The sculptures belong to Cheuk Yiu Lo, who is based between Hong Kong and London. The artist uses a range of materials in her figurative sculptures—some are plaster, some cement, and others wood.
The sculptures also differ in their level of detail. While some resembled the fragile, elongated forms of Alberto Giacometti, others achieve the natural, more rounded finish associated with classical sculpture, which perhaps can be credited in part to her time working as an assistant to the prolific British sculptor Mark Richards.
Mary Stephenson at Royal Academy Schools
The playful, surrealist paintings of Mary Stephenson were on the team's radar ahead of Royal Academy Schools' graduate show.
Her two-person show with Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, Absent Presence (24 February–19 March 2023), was a brilliant introduction to Stephenson's whimsical uninhabited spaces.
For her graduate show, the artist, who previously studied at Glasgow School of Art, presented three large oil paintings. In the space before them lay crash mats in various shapes, including a triangular prism, a small set of stairs, and a ramped hexahedron.
Discarded and oddly defunct, these playhouses and crash mats imply human presence, while exploring the fertile ground of the space around them.
Hannah Uzor at Slade School of Fine Art
Hannah Uzor's portraits had a beautifully imposing presence at the Slade show. Born in Zambia, she became one of the youngest members of the National Arts Council of Zambia while still at secondary school, but with no clear path forwards she put a halt on her art career.
Sixteen years after moving to London, Uzor resumed her art career, gaining her Fine Art Diploma at London's Kensington and Chelsea College, before enrolling at Slade for her MFA.
Using portraiture as a means to explore themes of race and erasure, and the complexities of black identity and experiences, the figures and arrangements that fill her canvases are informed by archival images, historical paintings, family photographs, and literature.
In 2020, the charity English Heritage acquired her portrait of the Black British historical figure Sarah Forbes Bonetta for their Black History Month display at Osborne House. English Heritage subsequently commissioned five further portraits of historical figures of the African diaspora for their project titled, Painting Our Past: The African Diaspora in England.
Rachel Hobkirk at Royal Academy Schools
Morbidly fascinating, Rachel Hobkirk paints large-scale realist canvases of china and plastic dolls. Rather than capturing the beauty with which dolls are usually associated, eyelashes are peeling, lipstick is smeared, and dark makeup has been applied, giving them a bruised appearance.
Frames have been cropped and collaged in some instances, making the compositions feel even more disjointed and, at times, harrowing.
Following this show, Hobkirk is scheduled to have two respective solo exhibitions in Europe, the first in September at L.U.P.O. - Lorenzelli Projects, Milan, and the second at L21 Gallery, Palma, Mallorca in January 2024.
Main image: Exhibition view: Shaan Bevan and Cheuk Yiu Lo, Slade Degree Shows (19–25 May 2023), London. Photo: Annabel Downes, Ocula Advisory.
