Nouvelle Vague

Okiki Akinfe is a London-based painter. She completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and her BA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2022. Her practice centres on creating an alternative to the conventional archive, encompassing ‘The Black Lens’, a subversive tool towards avoiding stereotypes by demonstrating their absurdity. Authenticity involves the othered experience, refocusing the position of the White Gaze to a Black Gaze. The figures within the paintings are visible and un-visible, investigating placing and un-placing ghostly Black figures in landscapes, within their own realities, on their own terms. A space in world-building for these figures to exist in a non-social geographical space, paused in their own time agency, resting in the perseverance of time. Highlights of recent exhibitions include ‘Free The Wind, The Spirit, and The Sun’ curated by Yinka Shonibare, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2023); ‘Hauntology: Ghostly Matters’ curated by Aindrea Emelife, Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago (2023). Akinfe is currently an artist in residence at Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall, UK.

Julia Bennett is an American artist living and working in London. Bennett completed a Master’s in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2022) and a Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Photography/New Media at Seattle Pacific University (2017). Bennett’s process weaves old and new paintings together, the original image split, creating a fracture between time and perception. As paint and clay are layered to coalesce the pixelated fragments of canvas, a new truth appears. The spectres of history and the lands come together for a brief moment of healing – a symbol of remediation. Bennett’s paintings become a reflection of our entangling with a colonised and over-consumed Earth; remembering the ghosts of our making and bridging the threshold to possible futures.

Max Boyla is a Scottish artist based in London who graduated from the Royal Academy Schools. Holding to a tradition that sees painting as an illusion, Boyla’s work can exist in a perpetual limbo: a place where the limited and real-world mingles with the eternal and fictional. His satin surfaces, a synthetic material derived as a petroleum by-product, create tension, offering a lustre towards abstract cosmologies. Shorn of all sense of time and place, fantasies of the infinite collide with a questioning of a contemporary state of disillusionment. Highlights of recent exhibitions include ‘Slow Motion’, Des Bains, London (2023, duo); ‘Slivers in the Void’, Mamoth, London (2023, group); ‘Add More Fuel To Your Life’, Sim Smith, London (2023, solo); ‘Inside Out’, The Artist Room, London (2022, group).

Lewis Brander grew up and was educated in the UK and studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 2018. He lives and works in London. An observer of the shifts in natural light in both Northern and Southern Europe, the colour of the sky has become a constant reference in Lewis Brander’s paintings since returning to London from Greece three years ago. All located within urban spaces, visual indicators of London and Athens’ built environments are omitted from the paintings, leaving any specific marker of place to their title. By not making direct reference to the built environment, the artist’s own interests in post-war American abstraction become counterpoints to works which appear at first to fit within the legacy of English Romantic landscape painting. The interplay between gesture, colour and ground and the push and pull of representation and abstraction means that often our own initial associations with a landscape is cultural. His first solo exhibition was with Vardaxoglou Gallery London in 2022. In 2023 he was awarded a place on the inaugural Tracey Emin Artist Residency at the Tracey Emin Foundation in Margate UK. He is represented in London by Vardaxoglou Gallery.

Annice Fell graduated from the Masters Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and earned her BA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2020. Fell’s bold paintings sit between automatic painting and gestural abstraction, drawing on surrealist techniques such as decalcomania and automatism. Her works respond to the shifting meanings of the world, registering thought and feeling through mark-making rather than depiction. What emerges are residues of action and reaction –moments rebuilt from undoing– where medium and matter transform internal states into visceral presence. Fell was the recipient of the Betty Malcolm Prize and the Richard Ford Award. Her work can be found in the collection of the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX, US.

Mannat Gandotra is a Painter based in London. She completed her BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2023 and is currently enrolled in her Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Her paintings are made through processing everyday life, sights and sounds. They are about experience, and the process is incidental. It begins with marks on the surface of the canvas, and then she begins to extract forms she sees in the colours, washes and spaces. As she paints, she is interested in the effect of colours appearing to emit light, and forms appearing to become gliding ships or sinking kites. In some paintings, there are wild gardens where rhythms collide, nature breaks down, and compositions reordering and disrupting harmony. Atonal, syncopated, dissonant – this is how she sees the world. Jarring languages, senses, and sounds all meshed into the paint. A cycle of lost and found. Recent exhibitions and residencies include ‘Cornershop’, Indigo + Madder, London (2023); Dallas Art Fair with Luce Gallery (2023); Artissima with Luce Gallery (2023). She will have her debut solo exhibition, ‘All of Civilisation on a Leaf’, with Luce Gallery in November 2023.

Nour Malas is a Syrian artist currently based in Chicago. She completed an MFA in sculpture at SAIC, Chicago and received her BFA at Goldsmiths University, London. Malas approaches painting in a way to help make better sense of the complicated confrontations of placeless-ness, loss and instability. She conveys ideas of what it’s like to be in a body and within a space, by making work that quite literally relates to her own body; its gestures, its scale, and its preconscious memories. Movement is muse as Malas follows lines and forms—figures, animals, an occasional vehicle- along the surface. Drawing on the pictorial strategies of artists ranging from Edvard Munch to Mark Rothko, Malas’ paintings become legible as internal landscapes, representations of experience that blur reality, dream, and memory, proposing an alternate space for perception. The artist has exhibited globally with Carbon 12 Gallery and will present her debut solo exhibition, ‘Running’, in November 2023 at Diana Gallery in New York.

Ella McVeigh graduated in 2020 with an MA in Painting from The Royal College Of Art. McVeigh’s paintings are webbed with art history, the role of nature in art-making and the possibilities and meanings of painting today. Starting primarily from found imagery of the natural world, McVeigh explores painting as a mental performance of visual decision-making. McVeigh’s purely abstract work is a persisting interrogation of line, colour and form through paintings and drawings that capture in great detail the complexities of looking at images, while also eluding any efforts to be read as stories. She sees her way of painting as a problem-solving process, creating harmony out of chaos while combining natural and artificial structures. Highlights of recent exhibitions include “Once, Then, Gone’, Newchild Gallery (2023, group); ‘NOW (curated by Romero Pimenta’, Museu Inima De Paula, Belo Horizonte (2023, group); ‘Each Glance Branching’, Newchild Gallery (2021, solo); Tomorrow: London, White Cube (2020). McVeigh will have a solo exhibition with Opdahl Gallery in Oslo in 2024. McVeigh is a recipient of the Chadwell Award. Her work is part of the University of the Arts London Art Collection.

H. E. Morris completed her PhD in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2025, after receiving a MA from Goldsmiths in Contemporary Art Theory, a MFA from the University of Iowa in Painting and Drawing, and a BA from Hampshire College. Morris was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA in 2019, and a Soho Revue Artist in Residence in 2023. Her practice is interested in working through a place of emotion to search for a truth. Structuring her paintings through memory, she explores the temporalities of narrative in order to test a notion of time that splits between working through absence and presence. Morris’s work can also be found in the collection of the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX, US; and in Museu Inimá de Paula, Brasil.

Min Woo Nam is a Korean artist based in London. He holds a Master’s degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a degree from the London School of Economics. His formative experience serving with the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Sudan deeply informs his ongoing enquiry into consciousness, perception, and moments of meaningful coincidence that shape lived experience and selfhood. By pairing delicate tonal transitions with measured brushwork, Nam’s work probes the spatial limits of abstraction, creating a field of depth that exists between the known and the unknown. His practice focuses on the liminality between recognisable form and abstraction. This ambiguity is achieved through accumulated layers and subtle transitions in hue, which allow him to evoke internal luminosity and the canvas’s spatial depth.

Highlights of recent exhibitions include Nothing New under the Sun, a solo exhibition at LBF Contemporary, London (2024); Within and Beyond, Rosenfeld Gallery, London (2023); Nouvelle Vague, LBF Contemporary, London (2023); Timescapes, Shtager & Shch, London (2023); Passages, D Contemporary, London (2023); and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London (2022). In 2024, Min Woo was an artist-in-residence at the Vannucci Artist Residency supported by The Deighton Family Foundation in Umbria, Italy.

Sofia Nifora is a Greek artist based in London. She completed her BA in Fine Art at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole, and her MA in Fine Art Painting at the Royal College of Art (2022). Her work revolves around a fantasy and of joint reality. Drawing upon the landscapes from a rural upbringing in Greece, Nifora creates a place of childish idealisation. Her paintings work as metaphors/allegories to memory and function as autonomous beings, surpassing their identity as clones of the original objects. Nifora aims to create a visual language where the organic, the artificial, the tangible, and the impalpable coexist, giving form to surreal elements of fragmented memories. The artist recently presented a solo exhibition ‘We too have been there, though we shall land no more’ in 2023 at ATM Gallery in New York and will present a solo exhibition with Baert Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024. Highlights of recent group exhibitions include ‘on abstraction’, Taymour Grahne, London (2023); ‘A new sensation’, curated by Henry Relph, Gallery Marguo, Paris (2023).

Christopher Stead is a London based multi-disciplinary artist, curator and documentarian of British counterculture. In 2016 Christopher graduated with a First Class BA Hons in Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where he received the Painter-Stainers Scholarship Prize and Brian Till Art History Thesis Award. In 2023 he graduated from the Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art, London with a Masters Degree. Stead is the co-founder and director of the London based curatorial collective Pigeon Park, which was created in response to the post-pandemic threat posed to artists’ working conditions in the wake of the Covid crisis. Driven by a fear of ‘institutional’ boredom, Stead questions cultural hegemony and the inherited hierarchies that pervade the socio-political cul de sac that is Brexit Britain. Informed by both ecological and economic positions, discarded materials such as single-use plastics, electronic wires and industrial nets are recovered and upcycled to create a bubbling stock. The recycled matter grows and gathers in a fertile manner into a reusable source, which can be repurposed time and time again.This shape-shifting practice focuses on the conditions of post-pandemic materiality by turning life’s lemons into lemonade through the agency of found matter. Gleaned detritus and mined materials are woven together, creating spectral nervous systems which index the entanglement of past, present and lost futures. This regenerative practice reimagines spaces of other into storage vats of regional, cultural and collective memory, inviting human presence, participation and play. Highlights of recent exhibitions include’ Autonomic Ambience Vol 1’, Ruttkowski;68, Cologne, Germany (2023, solo); ‘Ghost Notes’, Fold Gallery (2023, duo); ‘You Turn Me Inside Out’, Fold Gallery, London (2022, solo). 

Moving from her hometown of Chengdu in southwest China to Los Angeles, Zhong merged fragments of presence and recollection into her abstract paintings. Her works are marinated by colors and light captured in her personal photographs, which led to a series of collages and drawings. The painting itself gains a living pulse; it works to hold onto those deep, intangible feelings and prevent moments in time from slipping away. The final outcomes appear to drift away from their original references, yet remain mysteriously suspended on the canvas.

Zhong often spends hours painting while listening to the minimalist music composed by Philip Glass. The music effectively fills the gap between her imagination and her intention for the work, in turn inspiring the way she utilizes memory in her art. Through the rhythmic ostinato and evolving textures of Glass’s compositions, Zhong finds herself returning to the same photographs and themes to push the repetition to its limit. This investigative process leads directly to what her painting is truly about: embodiment.

Zhong’s work is in the collection of AMOCA in Cardiff, Wales and the New Century Art Foundation (NCAF) in Shanghai, China.