Past Exhibitions and Events

'What is Becoming Us?’

22/06/22-29/06/22

Showcasing 16 RCA Painting Graduates

"What is becoming us" is an extension of the graduate show at the Royal College of Art. A group of sixteen graduates from the painting program will showcase new works, giving you the chance to see more than just one glimpse of what they have been developing during their two-year course.

Becoming an artist? Becoming a professional? Becoming independent? Becoming is the affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Having just one final show seems to be hinting at the idea of the masterpiece, the culmination, or the complete synthesis. The extension show dares to contradict and jump to the side, off-center it asks "what is becoming us" but also when is becoming us, and does it become us?

Artists: Albano Hernandez, Aoibhin Maguire, Hanne Peeraer, CHO Hui-Chin, Julia Bennett , Kara Hondong, Kashin Patel, Kate Howe, Konstantinos Argyroglou, Lara Davies, Megan Menzies, Nora Neagoe, Rosalind Howdle, Sarah Nahas, Tommy Camerno, Yichu Shi

Curator: Kara Hondong

Top left: Albano Hernandez is a Spanish artist living and working in London, UK. "Growing up in Avila, a region of Spain where meat consumption is part of the culture, and where the meat industry comprises a significant weight in the region's economy, has led me to focus on the aesthetics that meat generates as commodity. I have obsessive thoughts with the processes of fragmentation, packing, distribution and exposure of animal bodies under the meat label… The manipulation and perception of materiality interests me more than its production."

Top right: Aoibhin Maguire is a painter originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. "As someone who experiences a wide range of intense emotions, I often struggle to talk about what my paintings are about... I explore the contradictions and intricacies of modern capatalist culture; over saturation of opportunities paralleled with loneliness and feelings of being completely lost. I find modern culture to be so warm and yet so cold and isolating at the same time."

Bottom left: Hanne Peeraer is a Belgian artist who grew up in Italy.
"Currently trying to recreate the wonder, curiosity, and mild headache that I used to get from looking at Magic Eye pictures when I was kid."

Bottom right: CHO Hui-Chin. "The intersections, enigmas, and inevitable conflicts of multiculturalism are central (to the practice). Her body installation performances challenges conventional art-and-spector relationships, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience or brief movement rather than on labeled material objects."

Top left: Konstantinos Argyroglou is a Greek artist based in London. "At this moment he is exploring ways of revisiting his childhood memories both physical and emotional, providing an economy of care in the field of learning difficulties and dyslexia."

Top right: Lara Davies is a Welsh artist based in London. "Lara thinks of her paintings as a slightly shabby stage where the current generation of housemates are this season's players. The sense of longing is still detectable, the sticky cling of nostalgia bound to the languid surfaces, yet alongside an absence, the paintings are full with grubbiness and interiority, relationships, comfort and anxiety.

Bottom left: Megan Menzies. "My red cheek pressed against the cool glass of the car window produces a haze of colour, turning an ordinary grey and green motorway landscape pink. The landscape blushes nostalgically and the raindrops that I watch land and slide down to the bottom of the window glimmer behind the rose-tinted glass."

Bottom right: Nora Neagoe is a Romanian artist based in London. "Looking at surveillance, control, the invasion of privacy, I depict how female bodies are being seen by society and the male gaze. I distort the bodies of women, to bring comfort to the viewer. Using exaggerated perspectives, the figures are in power, being superior to the viewer's eye. The viewer is drawn in by the warm and pastel tones and the playfulness of the works but also feels uncomfortable."

Top left: Julia Bennett "My practice serves as a reminder of our impossible present; a time of rupture and of ghosts. Within this, I explore desecration, collective mourning, and the paradox of ongoingness and futurelessness. Through this navigation, painting has become a way to see, to grieve, and to contemplate healing."

Top right: Kara Hondong is a German painter and is THE CURATOR OF THIS SHOW!
"My painting practice follows a dedicated investigation through materials and the in-betweeness of transformations and translations. Playing with elaborate techniques of Masking and sealing, I explore the potential of three-dimensionality in painting through both spatial and material layering."

Bottom left: Kashin Patel is an artist from India." Kashin's work is autobiographical including themes such as self, social existence, relationships, isolation and anxiety. Dismembered figures that represent the artist or others around her, weave a narrative of experiences often using humour to express seriousness. Kashin's ongoing series on fabric brought from India, explores ideas of home, family, longing and stability."

Bottom right: Kate Howe is an American artist living and working in London and is THE HOST OF THIS SHOW! "Howe's work resists complicity with historical precedent. In her work, she responds to the canonical record by viewing existing works through the lens of forensic anthropology, and engaging with these works as evidence, recontextuslising paintings and resurrecting the ghosts."

Top left: Rosalind Howdle "The metamorphosis taking place in the course of painting seem to mimic the biological processes that underpin my subject matter: evolution, reproduction, and self-repair. Organic forms regularly appear but are inaccurate, misremembered, or perhaps reimagined. By skewing recognisability and skirting definition, one can access a kind of non-verbal intelligibility that is painting specific."

Top right: Sarah Nahas "One stitch after another, after another, after another... That is what I have been doing every single day for the last year. I am like the thread you meticulously try to pass into the eye of the needle. It needs all of one's attention in order to slide in. You have to be the thread, and look just under your nose, let all of your worries slide away, because in the space of that second, nothing else exists."

Bottom left: Tommy "My work captures objects in moments of decadence, depicting the gestures of falling down and rising again. Images of divas, dandies and belconies are entangled between layers of abstraction. I question codes of behaviour and lifestyles within society looking at the things that surround us, what endures, what divides and what shines through the gaps."

Bottom right: Yichu Shi "My work is like a space, lined with 'The containers of the soul', under the seemingly marginal confined circle is infinite space. The repetition of symbolic patterns, the characteristics of circles with no corners, and various levels of different shades and transparency create a contradictory space of cyclical change and stillness."