LONDON.- Mall Galleries is presenting the eighth edition of FBA Futures, the UK’s largest annual survey showcasing the best in contemporary figurative art. Mapping new practices and ideas of representation and draughtsmanship, FBA Futures 2020 presents over seventy works by forty-eight of the most outstanding art graduates of 2019.
Clare O’Brien, CEO of Mall Galleries said, “FBA Futures 2020 is comprised of artists who we hope will go on to shape the future of figurative art. They will join artists from the last seven years of Futures whose works are now in the collections of museums and galleries in the UK and Europe. This reflects the strong resurgence of interest in figurative art and especially contemporary painting, seen across the wider art market.”
FBA Futures 2020 reveals a significant interest in the body especially from female artists including Amy Steer, Miranda Forrester, Rosanna Dean and Iyesha Walker. The artists explore body politics, gender identity, the physicality of the body, and the body in society; present feminist perspectives on their own bodies, and challenge the male gaze in the history of painting.
Themes of personal and collective cultural memory feature in other works including Eleanor Watson’s small oil paintings on natural woods of domestic objects from stately homes built on the wealth of the Empire, are reminders that some histories require active unforgetting; and in Da Hyoung Choi’s The Same Area 19 Days Later, Mercue Hotel in Aden, Yemen the artist archives images of buildings lost in the conflict and applies the Renaissance perspective to create a new image in paint.
On 1 January 2020 Lydia Blakeley was announced as the winner of the new Minerva Prize, an award for experimentation in figurative art, given to a graduate artist thinking proactively about their career; Tobi Alexandra Falade wins the Hottinger Prize, given to the outstanding graduate artist of 2019, with her work joining the Hottinger collection of contemporary art by new and emerging artists; and Alexandra Searle wins the Be Smart About Art award.
FBA Futures 2020, participating artists: Sara Anstis, Lydia Blakeley, Mark Bletcher, Lena Brazin, Jason Broad, Joseph Buhat, Da Hyoung Choi, Alex Clayton, Mikey Croft, Rosanna Dean, Manon Dowse, Mariia Drobot, Andrew Eadington, Tobi Alexandra Falade, Miranda Forrester, Chris Gilvan-Cartwright, Max Gimson, Madelynn Green, Katie Harman, Florence Hutchings, Helen Ireland, George Spencer Jackson, Chloe Johnson, Kathryn Johnson, Seungwon Jung, Yanu Jung, Ewan Keenan, Claire Kidd, Alice Linsell, Oliver Mulvihill, Josh Newsome, Charlotte Osborne, Susan Rocklin, Danny Romeril, Paolo Salvador, Alexandra Searle Konstantinos Sklavenitis, M E Smit-Dicks, Amy Steel, Shinuk Suh, Jack Sutherland, Izzy Treyvaud, Osaretin Ugiagbe, Marijke Vasey, Andrew Watson, Ella Walker, Iyesha Walker and Eleanor Watson
