LONDON.- From 1 to 5 September 2026,
Ordovas presents a solo exhibition by Matilde de Oliveira Roque, the winner of the 2025 Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Award.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the award. The Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust was established in 2006 after the death of Valerie Beston (1922-2005) who was renowned for supporting and nurturing the careers of many of the leading artists working in London throughout her extraordinary fifty-year career, including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The charity was established to support artists at the beginning of their careers; it has since collaborated with the Royal College of Art to award an annual prize to a postgraduate student selected from its degree show. The prize comprises a studio for a year at SPACE, a financial contribution towards materials, tutorial support generously provided by the RCA, and a solo exhibition at the end of the year, held since 2020 at Ordovas.
Previous winners include Caroline Walker (2009) who has since been the subject of solo exhibitions across the UK, including most recently at Hepworth Wakefield (2025), and whose work is now found in the collections of major international institutions including Tate, the British Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Prez Art Museum; and more recently Emma Prempeh (2022) whose work What’s Left?, 2024, was recently acquired by Tate.
Matilde de Oliveira Roque (b. 2001, Lisbon) is a Portuguese painter based in London, UK. She completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London, in 2025, and a BA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art in 2023. She has recently taken part in group shows in London including Tender Grounds at Terrace Gallery (2025), Rverie de Fleur at The Salon (2025), and Parrhesia at the Hockney Gallery (2025), and in Manchester including Frequencies at Oceans Apart (2024).
Stills is Matilde’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. It consists of approximately 20 oil paintings of various scales, and explores a theme whereby fragments are reassembled as excavated pieces of a larger whole. According to the artist, “This ‘whole’ - or something that approximates an entirety - exists, existed, and is surfacing, bit by bit. Pictures accompany, compliment, repeat, negate, and contradict one other, arguing for attention, then sitting quietly, attended to.”
