Zena Blackwell

Zena Blackwell is an award-winning British figurative painter based in Cardiff, Wales.

Zena Blackwell's career

She holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins and a BA from Wimbledon College of Art, and most recently completed the Turps Correspondence Course. Blackwell has been shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Show and twice for the BEEP Painting Prize, winning the Friends of the Glynn Vivian* Prize at Beep in 2024. In 2017 she was awarded first prize at Cardiff MADE Summer Open, and in 2019 third prize at PS Mirabel's open exhibition PAINT, Manchester. She has exhibited at Saatchi Gallery and Hastings Contemporary, among other institutions, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the National Library of Wales and in private collections internationally, including by an Art News top 200 collector.

Her artistic approach

Blackwell's practice centres on the psychological landscape of adolescence, memory, and family life. Working in oil paint, she stages figures within richly patterned, domestic interiors that carry an atmosphere of stillness and latent tension. Drawing on personal memory and cultural nostalgia, her paintings explore the formative dynamics of childhood, identity, and belonging: moments of play, dress-up, and quiet contemplation rendered with an emotional charge that hovers between the familiar and the unsettling. The domestic setting becomes a psychological stage, in which gesture, gaze, and decorative detail conspire to reveal what is felt but rarely spoken.

*Plus TATE member gallery