Eve Ackroyd
Simeon Barclay
James Cabaniuk
Samuel Laurence Cunnane
Hollis Frampton
Ryan Gander
Nan Goldin
Merlin James
Sooim Jeong
Laura Lancaster
Rachel Lancaster
William McKeown
Robin Megannity
Wang Pei
Hannah Perry
Ki Yoong
Nan Goldin
Vivienne Tripping on the Beach, Donegal, Ireland, 1979
Inkjet print on fine art paper, edition 2 of 25
76.2 x 114.3 cm
Opening Reception: Thursday 3 July, 6–8pm
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Pictures of You, guest curated by Miles Thurlow (Co-founder of WORKPLACE).
The exhibition brings together 16 international and multigenerational artists, whose of images, objects and actions evoke specific, often fleeting, moments whilst simultaneously revealing incisive reflections on time, memory and social structures.
Eve Ackroyd, Cousins, 2025, oil on canvas, 51 x 46 cm / 20.1 x 18.1 in
Eve Ackroyd is a London-based painter whose small, intimate paintings explore the interpersonal dynamics of familial relationships and friendships, as well as her own interiority and reflections on quotidian life. As well as human figures, animals often appear in avataristic, shapeshifting roles, bringing a rich a emotional timbre to her atmospheric scenes.
Simeon Barclay's work is also infused by memories of family dynamics – watching his father, a tailor, unfurling fabric, or playing dress-up as a child. In Pop Pose, he combines fragmented imagery from Hedi Slimane’s AW19 menswear collection for Celine with a recurring motif of a knight’s helmet fused with a child’s cycling helmet, rupturing the veneer of constructed ‘cool’ with incisive takes on class hierarchies.
James Cabaniuk, Pickle Jar, 2025, oil paint spray paint and glitter on canvas, 45 x 55 cm / 17.7 x 21.7 in
James Cabaniuk’s large, tactile paintings give abstract forms to queer erotic encounters. Bodily fluids and bodily contact are insinuated through glittering, polychromatic surfaces, sprayed and hand-smeared paint, and distorted, suggestive forms. Taking a dynamic, highly physical approach to painting, Cabaniuk draws upon the history of abstraction but ruptures its often-macho associations, bringing a fresh perspective to this tradition.
Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s analogue photographs deromanticise the popularly sentimental and yet their sensitivity to light, framing and texture give them a cinematic quality. Responding to the increasingly dematerialised nature of contemporary image making, Cunnane remains connected to the physicality of the production process, printing his photographs by hand in a darkroom. The resulting C-type prints are relatively small in size, resonating with the restrained, intimate nature of the work.
Hollis Frampton, Lemon, 1969, 16mm, 7 minutes
Hollis Frampton's 1969 video piece Lemon, shot on 16mm, gives a close study of a single citrus fruit, its devotional gaze drawing out the fruit’s bodily and sculptural qualities, and transforming a humble everyday object into something meditative and profound. Frampton’s choice of a lemon as subject is a reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the words ‘lemon plait’ feature as one of the text’s many hapax legomena (words or expressions that only appear once).
Ryan Gander presents two iconic modernist chairs – Gerrit Rietveld’s crate chair, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily B3 – overturned and covered in a marble ‘snow’. An irreverent, perhaps even iconoclastic, gesture is suffused and softened by an evocation of the element of surprise and wonder we experience upon looking out and seeing a landscape blanketed by snow. Ryan hints at a wider narrative, presenting traces of memories dislocated from time.
Nan Goldin is celebrated for her raw, affective photographs. Here, she captures her friend and collaborator, the Irish artist/filmmaker Vivienne Dick, in a moment of cosmic wonder on an isolated beach. She then turns the lens outwards to a lavender-infused, psychedelic vision of the Donegal coast.
Merlin James approaches the history and legacy of painting with a highly considered and unconventional viewpoint. Generally small in scale, his works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy.
Sooim Jeong, Summer Night Observers, 2024, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Sooim Jeong uses an exuberant, expressive style of painting to capture heightened moments of anxiety and melodrama. Upturned legs in pond suggest a disastrous event, but light handling of paint and a pastel palette give the subject a lightness of touch and disarming gentleness. Sooim’s loose brushwork is informed by her training in traditional calligraphy, and her paintings bring together a constellation of references, memories, symbolic objects into her idiosyncratic universe.
Laura Lancaster creates large, figurative paintings in a loose, energetic, wet-on-wet style. She collects boxes of anonymous analogue photographs, many of them family photos from holidays or leisure activities. Drawing upon this rich but abandoned archive of deeply personal memories, Lancaster transforms the photographs into shimmering, impressionistic paintings that transcend their source material and tap into a broader collective memory.
William McKeown, Untitled (2009–2011), oil on linen, 43 x 43 cm / 16.9 x 16.9 in
Rachel Lancaster’s luminous paintings give cinematic depictions of mostly female subjects. Building colour and depth using meticulous Renaissance techniques, Rachel draws upon 80s/90s B-movies, cult movies and photographs as source material, before radically cropping her images to create dramatic tension. Attention is paid to the way light falls on hair, clothing, or skin, creating a sense of intimacy and stillness punctuating an implied unseen narrative.
William McKeown’s paintings capture the openness and life-enhancing power of nature. Guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling, his paintings took on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, but presented us with so much more: nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt.
Robin Megannity, eating the middle (still), 2024, HD film with soundtrack by Alexander William Roberts, edition of 3 + 2 APs
Robin Megannity uses video and painting to create an uncanny and surreal ‘otherworld’ in which highly charged, symbolic objects – blades, ram skulls, fruit, tarot – interact with one another. Referencing art history, including Northern European still life paintings, and using traditional techniques, they nevertheless include the glitches, ruptures and defamiliarised atmosphere of their digital origins.
Wang Pei’s figurative paintings seem surreally suspended outside of time. His mysterious images are often drawn from films or digital sources, then cropped, distorted or brought into dramatically heightened chiaroscuro. The eternally-intriguing subject of the human form is treated with delicacy and attentiveness, using a distinctive technique akin to fresco and rendered in casein tempera, an ancient form of paint derived from milk, in a deliberate ‘slowing down’ of image making.
Hannah Perry, Rage Fluids, 2018, metal sound sculpture, 140 x 780 cm / 55.1 x 307.1 in
Hannah Perry’s large-scale installation Rage Fluids weaves through Pictures of You both physically and sonically, with huge sheets of curved metal and car wrap activated by the rumbling sound and vibrational energy of car stereo subwoofers. Perry, whose father ran a metal workshop in Runcorn, draws upon the industrial environment of her upbringing to comment on class, aspiration, manufacturing, the fetishistic cult of the automobile and its false promise of a high-gloss life.
Ki Yoong’s small-scale, intimate portraits are often housed in metal frames that give the feel of a small shrine or devotional object. Closely cropped to frame their subjects’ faces, these exquisitely detailed portraits give hyperreal but tender renderings of warm light as it falls on cheekbones, sweat glistening on the surface of skin, brows, lashes, lips. Sensuous in its treatment, yet often with a sombre undertone, each work feels like a secret shared between painter and subject, capturing a vulnerability and sense of deep connection.
Simeon Barclay
Pop Pose, 2023
black ACM board, vinyl, metal, oil and acrylic paint, chain, replica Great Helm, children’s unicorn bicycle helmet, acrylic on canvas, plastic rose
158 x 150 cm frame & 40 x 38 x 21 cm helmet
James Cabaniuk
Pickle Jar, 2025
oil paint spray paint and glitter on canvas
45 x 55 cm / 17.7 x 21.7 in
Samuel Laurence Cunnane
Peony (red floor), 2024
Hand-printed C-type print on archival photo paper, edition of 3 + 1AP
19.4 x 29.5 cm / 7.6 x 11.6 in image size
40.5 x 51 cm / 15.9 x 20.1 in framed
Ryan Gander
Overturned Rietveld chair after a snow flurry, 2017
ash, marble resin
60 x 62 x 84 cm / 23.6 x 24.4 x 33.1 in
Nan Goldin
Vivienne Tripping on the Beach, Donegal, Ireland, 1979
inkjet print on fine art paper edition 2 of 5
78 x 116 x 5 cm / 30.7 x 45.7 x 2 in framed
Nan Goldin
Lavender Landscape, Buncrana, Ireland, 2002
inkjet print on fine art paper edition 2 of 7
78 x 116 x 5 cm / 30.7 x 45.7 x 2 in framed
Robin Megannity
eating the middle, 2024
HD film with soundtrack by Alexander William Roberts
edition of 3 + 2 APs
about the artists
Eve Ackroyd
b. 1984, UK
Eve Ackroyd seeks out stories of female friendship and motherhood, celebrating sublime andintimate moments of quotidian life. She treats the figure—whether human or otherwise—as a vessel through which to explore candor and humor, secrets and surprise. Ackroyd’s paintings convey sensuality and stillness, exploring an interplay between the elusive gazes of viewer and subject. Her rich color palette and sinuous forms transfigure memories of familial and platonic connection into an ethereal world of mutual recognition and wordless conviviality.
Ackroyd studied painting at Chelsea College of Art & Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. Recent shows include Fifth Floor Apartment, Turn Gallery, New York; La Banda, TV Projects, New York; Within Without, Project Art Space, New York; Interior Landscapes, Assembly Room, New York; Living and Real, Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia; Sweet Cheeks, Big Pictures, LA and Subject III, Cob Gallery, London. Her work has been written about for FT, Times, Brooklyn Rail, I-D, AnOther, Dazed & Confused, Artsy and Hyperallergic.
Simeon Barclay
b. 1975, Huddersfield, UK
Simeon Barclay draws upon a rich vein of pop cultural sources, producing works that activate complex cultural histories and exploring the ways in which we navigate identity. Combining a diverse range of media, Barclay engages with aspects of aesthetics, British culture, subjectivity and memory. Barclay spent his formative years working in the manufacturing industry in the North of England and this background feeds into his work – addressing narrow constructions of masculinity, as well as informing his use of glossy surfaces and industrial fabrication techniques. As a youth, became preoccupied with fashion, citing its vitality as a conduit for both embellishment and resistance. These seemingly disparate and contradictory influences allow Barclay to expand his research examining alternative narratives, as well as addressing the complexity of inheritance, aspiration and desire.
Barclay has a BA from Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds (2010) and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London (2014). He has exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Southbank Centre, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, London; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Workplace Foundation, Gateshead; Holden Gallery, Manchester; The Tetley, Leeds; Cubitt Gallery, London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Jerwood Space, London; Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Arcadia Missa, New York; W139, Amsterdam and British Art Show 9. His work is in the Arts Council Collection, London; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Manchester Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery collection, Manchester.
James Cabaniuk
b. 1987, Carlisle, UK
James Cabaniuk employs abstraction and strategies of queer opacity and temporalities to construct thickly layered large scale abstract oil paintings. Seeking to liberate personal trauma from shame, and exploring queer identity and history, the authoritative singularity and machismo of 20th Century Abstract Expressionist painting becomes a world wherein Cabaniuk navigates their own complex relationship to the power it embodies – simultaneously fetishising and critiquing it. Materiality and performativity are held in tension by Cabaniuk and materials such as confetti, glitter, and soil serve as tools of celebration, resilience, and connection. Through gestural spontaneity the paintings become energetic sites that embody concepts of fun, camp, sexuality, gender, self-destruction, healing, and community to challenge and embrace boundaries.
Cabaniuk lives and works between Manchester and London. They have a BA from Chelsea College of Arts (2015) and MFA from Goldsmiths, London (2023). During their MFA they transformed the men’s toilets in the studios into the gay bar LIPS, hosting parties and installing a glory hole. Their work has been shown at Workplace, Queer Direct, Almanac and Lima Zulu, all in London; Slugtown, Newcastle; ARTLAND, Milan; All Welcome, Vilnius; and as part of the ongoing curatorial project Archeology (various locations, UK) with artist Jamie Bradley. From 2018–2019, Cabaniuk started and ran horseshed, a queer archive and exhibition space in a rural shed and online. In 2015, they were commissioned by Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners to commemorate their 30th anniversary.
Samuel Laurence Cunnane
b. 1989, Co. Kerry, Ireland
Samuel Laurence Cunnane works with analogue photography, capturing scenes with a detached “floating eye” perspective. Whether in Guangzhou, Tehran, the Balkans, or his native Kerry, Cunnane is drawn to the unnoticed periphery: the outskirts of the city, where plants battle with concrete; the edges of housing developments, where newly built homes surround mounts of upturned earth; the frontier between interior and exterior, demarcated by fences, windows, topiary.
Cunnane has been the subject of exhibitions at Villa Concordia, Bamberg, Germany (2025); Öktem&Aykut, Istanbul (2025, 2021, 2017); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2024, 2020, 2015); OCT Boxes Museum of Art, Shunde, China (2018); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2016) and THEODORE: Art, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Radical Archaeologies, GLUCKSMAN, Cork (2024); Connections, Farmleigh House, Dublin and touring to venues nationwide (2024–25); THIS RURAL, Lismore Castle Arts, Co Waterford (2024); BEADS, Stations, Berlin (2023) and National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (2019).
Hollis Frampton
b. 1936, Wooster, OH, USA, d. 1984, Buffalo, NY, USA
Hollis Frampton is known for the broad and restless intelligence he brought to the films he made, beginning in the early 1960s, until his death in 1984. In addition to being an important experimental filmmaker, he was also an accomplished photographer and writer, and in the 1970s made significant contributions to the emerging field of computer science. He is considered one of the pioneers of what has come to be termed structuralism, an influential style of experimental filmmaking that uses the basic elements of cinematic language to create works that investigate film form at the expense of traditional narrative content. Along with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, he is one of the major figures to emerge from the New York avant-garde film community of the 1960s.
Ryan Gander
b. 1976, Chester, UK
Ryan Gander has established an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms – from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more besides. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, as well as a reinvention of both the modes of appearance and the creation of an artwork. His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, or a network with multiple connections and the fragments of an embedded story. It is ultimately a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own associations and invent their own narrative in order to unravel the complexities staged by the artist.
Gander lives and works in Suffolk and London. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, Netherlands. He has been a Professor of Visual Art at the University of Huddersfield and holds an honorary Doctor of the Arts at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Suffolk. In 2017 he was awarded an OBE for services to contemporary art. In 2019 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. In 2022, he was made RA for the category of Sculpture.
Recent solo shows include Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, Netherlands (2025); Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan (2025); Museo Helga de Alvear, Caceres, Spain (2024); Ishikawa Cultural Foundation, Okayama, Japan (2023); Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); East Gallery at NUA, Norwich, UK (2022); Space K, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2019). Major projects include dOCUMENTA (13); 54th Venice Biennale; Performa 15, New York; Liverpool Biennial; Biennale of Sydney; British Art Show 8; Panorama, High Line, New York; Locked Room Scenario, commissioned by Artangel, London; Intervals, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Happy Prince, Public Art Fund, Central Park, New York.
Nan Goldin
b. 1953, Washington DC, USA
Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, and including herself as a subject, Nan Goldin’s work has transformed the role of photography in contemporary art. Her photographs and moving-image works address essential themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality. Uniting art and activism, Goldin has confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s and today brings international attention to the overdose crisis.
Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin grew up outside of Boston. She left home at age fourteen, and at sixteen enrolled in the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where she acquired her first camera. Attending Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts beginning in 1974, she would start working principally with Cibachrome prints and 35mm slides, taking photographs in saturated color. Relocating to New York in 1978, Goldin began documenting members of her chosen family in a milieu of New Wave clubs, No Wave cinema, and post-Stonewall gay culture.
Goldin has had solo exhibition in many of the world's leading museums, including MoMA, New York; Tate, London; IMMA, Dublin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Stedelijk, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Louvre, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; National Museum, Prague; Rencontres d'Arles and many more.
Merlin James
b. 1960, Cardiff, UK
Merlin James approaches the history and legacy of painting with a highly considered and unconventional viewpoint. As commented by Artforum’s Sherman Sam, his work “has sought to rigorously problematise the experience of painting while simultaneously deepening its formal language”. Generally small in scale, his works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy. His ‘frame paintings’ on gauzy, sheer material treat the structure of the picture frame and stretcher bar as an integral part of the work, while works on canvas might be collaged with tufts of hair or sawdust, distressed, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted. Also an erudite and thoughtful critic, James has a deep engagement with the history of art and this knowledge shapes and informs his practice. His works refine and renew many of painting’s most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture.
Merlin James has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Venice Biennale, Wales Pavilion; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; KW Institute, Berlin; Kunstsaele, Berlin; CCA, Glasgow; Kunstverein, Freiberg; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; OCT, Shunde & Shenzhen; Anton Kern, New York; Philadelphia Art Alliance. Selected international collections include Tate, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China and National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. An artist monograph, gathering 40 years of the artist’s work, was published in 2023.
Sooim Jeong
b. 1983, South Korea
Sooim Jeong's practice draws upon a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Jeong’s approach is informed learning traditional calligraphy as a teenager in Korea. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images within the confined space of the canvas. Jeong repeatedly incorporates familiar imagery into her paintings such as shirts, mittens, and vases, each holding a distinct and singular meaning. Through stylistic motif – depictions of verdant foliage, orange fruit, and forms of smoke, drizzle, and haze – she delicately infuses her canvas with a whimsical, cartoon-like charm, influenced by her physical surroundings and experience of living close to Greenwich Park in Southeast London.
Sooim Jeong is a London-based Korean artist who holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2010) and a BA Fine Art from Kookmin University, Seoul (2007). She has exhibited widely including Unit 1 Gallery (2021), Royal Academy, London (2020), Mostyn, Llandudno (2019), Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2017), SÍM Gallery, Reykjavík (2017), Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2016), Block 336, London (2016), Interview Room 11, Edinburgh (2014) and The Lightbox Museum, Woking (2014). She has been shortlisted for the Mostyn Open 21 (2019), the Exeter Contemporary Open (2017) and Marmite Prize for Painting V (2016).
Laura Lancaster
b. 1979, Hartlepool, UK
The figure is central to the work of Laura Lancaster, its presence intensified by the opposing entropic force of abstraction which perpetually subsumes and engulfs the protagonist. Images that are of their era – located in time through incidental clues such as clothing, pose, and contingent detail – are monumentalised by Lancaster through painting. Rendered ambiguous through the looseness of her brushwork, images gleaned from found photographic images are dissociated from their specific context and orphaned from their original narrative to be re-presented as fragments. Through this process of isolation and dislocation her works become uncanny and symbolic, operating as signifiers of a wider, collective memory and a shared existential consciousness.
Laura Lancaster lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. Current exhibitions include Remember, Somewhere, a two-person show with Rachel Lancaster, BALTIC, Gateshead, 12 April – 12 October. Recent solo exhibitions include Closer and Further Away, Workplace, London; Inside The Mirror, Wooson Gallery, South Korea; Running Towards Nothing, Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Laura Lancaster, New Art Gallery, Walsall; and A Stranger's Dream, Sargent's Daughters, New York. She has been included in group exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery, London; Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Sunderland; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Royal Academy, London; Museum of Art, Kochi; Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo/Osaka; and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand.
Rachel Lancaster
b. 1979, Hartlepool, UK
Rachel Lancaster's practice is focused on painting and its intersections with the languages of cinema, music and photography. Working from an archive of photographic ‘stills’ from found moving imagery, alongside her own photographs, Lancaster translates images into into oil paintings that represent detailed fragments of a greater narrative. She is drawn to seemingly insignificant passing shots, extreme close ups of inanimate objects, commonplace domestic interiors. Divorced physically from their position within a narrative structure, these paintings become abstract, ambiguous and open-ended, drawing out the uncanny and potential psychological charge. The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, accruing many layers of colour and texture over time – a technique that encourages a dichotomy of definition and abstraction. The surface of the paint creates an array of optical effects; the anticipated details within the surface of the paint often give way to loose and minimal rendering on closer inspection by the viewer. Cropping, colour and mark-making are manipulated in order to play upon the latent 'otherness' and dreamlike qualities often found in cinema and how this can be reflected in painting.
Rachel Lancaster lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. Lancaster has exhibited widely and taken part in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. Current exhibitions include Remember, Somewhere, a two-person show with Laura Lancaster, BALTIC, Gateshead, 12 April – 12 October. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, UK; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan and Venice, Italy; Royal Academy, London, UK; Rye Art Gallery, Kent, UK; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK; Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Kotti-Shop, Berlin, Germany.
William McKeown
b. 1962, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland; d. 2011, Edinburgh, UK
William McKeown made paintings, drawings, prints and installations that captured the openness and life-enhancing power of nature. Guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling, his paintings took on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, but presented us with so much more: nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. Many of his paintings are scaled roughly to the size of the human chest, as if mirroring the capacity of our lungs to breathe in air. Sometimes presented in ‘room installations’, wooden structures with wallpaper, windows and artificial light that mimic a clinical setting, his works act as windows out onto the world – an escape from the repression and mundanity of everyday life and into the lightness and expansiveness of the sky, using subtle gradations of tone to create moments of exquisite beauty and bliss. Frequently using titles such as ‘Hope’ and ‘Freedom’, McKeown steered our attention to the air around us, capturing the feeling of our emergence into light and reminding us of our proximity to the infinite.
Current/forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show, The MAC, Belfast (9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026) and Coalescence: Happenstance, curated by Paul O’Neill at Shimmer Shimmer, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1 December 2024 – 30 November 2025). Solo exhibitions include Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, curated by Jonathan Anderson; Dallas Museum of Art; LOEWE Design District Store, Miami; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; mima, Middlesbrough; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. In 2005, McKeown represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale.
Robin Megannity
b. 1985, North-West, UK
Historical techniques and traditions of painting are appropriated and quoted in Robin Megannity's work. The artist fuses the pathos, melancholy and solemnity of Northern European still life paintings with references to digital image-making. Glitches and ruptures connect the temporality of historical source imagery with commonplace contemporary means of media manipulation. Similarly, the anodine and lifeless simulations of computer renderings or product advertising are imbued with the historical weight and meaning of painting, pulling them out of the virtual and lending them authenticity. Megannity perpetually reframes and recontextualises his source imagery to create an internal dissonance or aberration that pushes his works beyond the seductive beauty of their rendering towards a potent assertion of ambivalent detachment.
Megannity is based in Greater Manchester, UK. He holds an MA Painting from Manchester School of Art (2021) and BA Fine Art from University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (2007). Selected solo exhibitions include Call of the Void, Workplace, London (2023); ferme la fenêtre, Kristian Day Gallery, London (2021); Goes Without Saying, Bunker Gallery, Manchester (2019); and Compression, Studios Gallery, New Mills (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Fayre Share Fayre, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2022); In Crystallized Time, Museum Of Museums, Seattle (2021); ONE, Subsidiary Projects, San Mei Gallery, London (2021); The Contact Layer, curated by Ian Gonczarow, Stewart Hall, Montreal (2020); and Unfamiliar Handshake, The Function Suite, curated by Brian Mountford, London (2020).
Wang Pei
b. 1989, China
In the work of Wang Pei, tightly cropped faces are rendered on canvas with meticulous and unwavering detail. Light glistens on the moist surface of an eye, translucent layers of saturated colour forms skin as minute crevices and folds undulating in and out of focus. Brooding dramatic tension is heightened by the murky chiaroscuro of a darkened background. Depictions of the face and body align with our innate human reflex and desires that are exploited by digital platforms to feed our perpetual engagement. Wang’s use of casein tempera – an ancient form of paint derived from milk and laden with historical and biological connotations – stands as a defiant affirmation of the tactile and the temporal. Surface texture, the play of light and shadow, and subtle gradations of colour are all given prominence, demanding a meditative attention that opposes the scrolling speeds of digital consumption.
Wang Pei lives and works in Barcelona. He holds a BA Sculpture (2012) and MA Oil Painting (2015) from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou and a PhD in Medieval Studies from University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain (2021). Selected exhibitions include Episode II: Home and Away, Matt Carey-Williams, London (2024); The Enneagram Mask, Workplace, London (2024); Prophetic Dreams, Kutlesa Gallery, Basel (2024); Vitalis Violentia, Podium Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); Mute, Tara Downs, New York (2024); Notes Toward a Shell, Tara Downs, New York (2024); Shape of times, Yi Gallery, HangZhou, China (2021). He received the National Arts Fund Young Art Talents Rolling Funding Project in 2018.
Hannah Perry
b. 1984, Chester, UK
Hannah Perry works across installation, sculpture, print and video. Continuously generating and manipulating materials (footage, sound clips, images and objects), Perry develops a sprawling network of references, carefully exploring personal memory in today’s hyper-technological society whilst bending back the systems of representation via hyperactive distribution. She is guided by music or speech, repetition, focalisation and deceleration, revealing the strength of our personal investment in images of the illusory (youth, power, sex, taste, lifestyle) as well as the prescriptive nature of these desires.
Perry lives and works in London. Perry has a BA Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, London and MA from Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Manual Labour, BALTIC, Gateshead (2024–5); NTNT, Chester Contemporary, Chester (2023); The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art, Bentonville (2021); A Smashed Window and an Empty Room, Kunstverein Hamburg (2019); GUSH, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2019); Liquid Language, MOCA Toronto (2019); GUSH, Somerset House, London (2018); Rage Fluids, Künstlerhaus, Gratz (2018); and ICA London (2015).
Ki Yoong
b. 1988, Bradford, UK
Ki Yoong’s paintings are marked by a quiet tenderness, underscored by his distinctive use of tightly cropped compositions. This deeply personal gesture focuses the gaze whilst suggesting intimacy and connection. The removal of visual information also opens space for projection, inviting the viewer to bring their own associations and memories into the process of looking. Rendered with meticulous detail, Yoong’s diminutive paintings are constructed from many translucent layers of oil paint, each applied with a tiny brush in a process akin to drawing. Rather than bold, expressive brushstrokes, Yoong favours subtle accumulation, fine gestures that coalesce into images that are concurrently precise and ephemeral.
Ki Yoong lives and works in London. Yoong has a BA Fine Art from University of Leeds (2010) and MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2013). Recent exhibitions include Figurative Impressions, Hurst Contemporary, London (2024); Studio West, MEGA Art Fair, Milan (2024); Marilyn, Plop Residency, London (2024); The Blush Upon Her Cheek, Studio West, London (2024); Faces/Faces, Slugtown, Newcastle (2023); The Picture, Brooke Benington, London (2023); Skin Deep, Studio West, London (2023); A Celebration of Portraiture, Marlborough Gallery, London (2023). Yoong has also collaborated with various brands and institutions such as Vogue, Alex Eagle, Paul Smith, and The House of St Barnabas.
