2023: In The Spotlight

From our team of curators’ favourites to works that we have shown around the world, immerse yourself in this year’s hand-picked highlights in our 2023: In The Spotlight Collection.

Henry Ward

Henry Ward explores the language of painting, investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. This exploration feeds into a wider study of the act of making, particularly concerning place. The artist describes his practice as beginning with three sites: the kitchen table, the garden shed, and the studio. These spaces inspire an ongoing dialogue between different ways of working and the environment in which one creates. Blocks of colour and a wedging and wrapping of form, shape, and texture make up an almost alchemical process whereby the result is slowly, intuitively, teased into being: “I am literally painting to find out what I am painting.”

Nelson Makamo 

Nelson Makamo is perhaps best known for his charcoal and oil paintings that redress decades of images that have portrayed African children as destitute. We had the pleasure of hosting a solo exhibition of Makamo’s work in New York City this year, presenting outstanding new works by the artist. Makamo infuses his portraits with peace and harmony, capturing the unconditional hope often reserved for children. Thus, he wishes to help the viewer rediscover this joy, re-igniting a love for simplicity and human connection.

Tribambuka

Anastasia Beltyukova, perhaps better known by her alias, Tribambuka, is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, award-winning illustrator and animation director working predominantly in painting and printmaking. As a British artist with Russian roots, Tribambuka takes a critical approach to the complexities of her heritage through a contemporary lens of feminist-fused-mythological thinking. Her striking, figurative visual language amalgamates creative elements in Russian Avant-garde, French Analytical Cubism and Fauvism, and the revolutionary spirit of the swinging sixties. Tribambuka balances chaos with symbolism and structure, instilling her works with an empowering narrative edge. Her visual stories shudder with a glorious, almost contagious rage - each piece harbouring an unapologetic desire to break free and seek vengeance. 

Robbie Bushe 

It is easy to lose yourself in the imagined worlds of Robbie Bushe; each composition is a treasure trove of meandering colours, lines, and clues towards covert lands and underground colonies. His illustrative oil paintings offer glimpses of futuristic cities, often through small, honeycomb gaps in his canvas. Daydreams, observation and reconstruction turn into sprawling, story-board panoramas; layered pictorial frames all but concealing a previous set of frames, hinting at what is yet to come. 

Niall Stevenson 

Human interaction with landscapes throughout millennia, notably through the creation and destruction of topographies, is central to Niall Stevenson's paintings. Drawn to ideas around layered histories extending back to the Neolithic period, Stevenson often uses sites of archaeological interest (cairns, hill forts, or enclosures) as a starting point for image-making or paints directly from scenes encountered walking in Scotland. These pictures, however, are not intended to be romantic or bucolic but serve as a catalyst for interpretive thought processes.

Magdalena Morey

The memories and marks left behind from travelling and the evolution of self form a core part of Magdelena Morey's artistic process. Morey uses colour, texture, and experimental mark-making to re-centre herself and connect with the world within and around her. Weathered surfaces, figures fused with landscapes, and abstract media combinations illustrate the different layers a life can take and the various threads that weave our stories together.