Outset Contemporary Art Fund has launched a three-year partnership between 2017-2019 with Tiffany & Co., which made seven rent-free studios in London available to outstanding MA Fine Art graduates from the capital’s finest art colleges.
For the 2019 edition, the seven prize-winning art school graduates – Nicolas Evans, Madelynn Green, Andrew Hart, Anthony Hensman, Joshua Kerley, Céline Manz and Lydia Wong – showcased their works with an exhibit unveiled on the 26 September 2019 at Tiffany’s new concept store in Covent Garden. During the three-week installation, visitors could view the visionary works by the winning MA Fine Art graduates, spanning an exciting variety of mediums from print and textiles to sculpture and ceramics and glass design.
The seven winners were selected from world-renowned art schools (Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, Goldsmiths University, the Royal College of Art, and Slade School of Fine Art) by an expert panel of judges comprised of Richard Moore (Divisional Vice President – Store Design & Creative Visual Merchandising, Tiffany & Co.), Melanie Manchot (Visual Artist), David A. Bailey CBE (Curator, Writer and Creative Director of International Curators Forum) and Matthew Slotover OBE (Publisher, Entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Frieze).
The Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize provides 12-month rent-free studio space to seven graduates from London’s premier art schools, allowing them to refine their practice. The project is part of the strategic private-public partnership – Studiomakers – to sustain the flow of ideas and talent in London through securing accessibility to creative workspaces.
Tiffany’s legacy with the arts dates back to its founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany, an original trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his son Louis Comfort Tiffany, a pioneering designer and jeweller of the American Art Nouveau movement. Tiffany continues its commitment to arts and culture with the recent support of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Tate Modern in December 2016 and a long-term sponsorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art biennials in New York City in 2017, 2019 and 2021.
Madelynn Mae Green
4 or 5 a.m., 2019
Madelynn is an American artist based in London. She obtained a BA in Politics before completing her MFA at Central Saint Martins in 2019. Her work pulls images out of obscurity and reinterprets video and photo reference material through the pictorial language of painting. She distorts colour, lighting, and works layer by layer to create alternative, intentionally fabricated versions of reality: paint drips, ground is left visible, and forms are ambiguous to emphasise constructedness. Exploring the politics of representation and documentation is central to her practice. Her figurative paintings of marginalised narratives explore themes of family, domesticity, and most recently crowd dynamics and dance
Anthony Hensman
Two States of Inertia, 2019
Anthony is a London based British artist with an MFA in Fine Art from Slade School of Art, UCL. All of his work engages with sport and pulls on his experience as an athlete, having played many sports at various levels from Club to International. He explores how it helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. Through sculpture, painting, drawing and video his work is always suggestive of collapse as an inevitability of an objects precarity or displacement. The balance and poise of his sculptures achieve contrasting levels of solidarity and fragility. The formations created examine the relationships between the body and its surrounding structures through looking at force, equilibrium, temporality and materiality.
Nicholas Evans
Glacier – Two Romantics Fighting, 2019
Nicolas is a sculptor and conceptual artist from Leicester. He studied sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art before studying a Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. His work utilises model making, text, narrative and satire to explore the way landscapes and places are used in political and social narrative throughout history, with particular interest in the notion of land in romantic art and its continued impact on contemporary ideas of place and national identity.
Lydia Wong
Weigh Up (No.2), 2019
Lydia is an artist based in London, originally from Hong Kong. While developing her art practice, Lydia also worked as a solicitor, illustrator and adviser in refugee and special educational needs rights. These influences have shaped her practice to offer narrative-rich works, which question systemic structures. She was awarded the V&A Museum’s Student Illustration Award for an illustrated narrative concerning censorship and nationalism in China. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in 2019 and currently works across installation, sculpture, video and writing.
Joshua Kerley
Plateau and Composite Lidded Jar, 2019
Joshua is a glass artist and designer whose practice is characterized by an experimental and progressive engagement with materials and process. Joshua studied BA Contemporary Crafts at Falmouth University, graduating in 2011, later returning to hold a position as senior technician. In 2018, Joshua won the Academic Gold Award at the Emerge Glass Prize and subsequently exhibited with Bullseye Projects at Collect 2019. In 2017, Joshua received the Charlotte Fraser Scholarship to study MA Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art, graduating in July 2019.
Andrew Hart
Sonic Ordering Theory featuring Kanika, 2019
Andrew was born and lives in London. He recently graduated with an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and studied BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist, but his works are based in painting. He traverses various mediums with his continued rhythmic questioning of the relation between painting and sound. He thinks through painting performance, video, sound, sculpture, language and installation. Andrew uses the formalities of painting as a frame to engage in his rhythmic dialogues that start at the juncture of painting and sound. He is currently working on his own theory ‘SonicOrdering’, activation and subcultures.
Céline Manz
Fold; Simulationisms – Limited Edition, 2017-2019
Céline is a research-based artist. She was educated as a bookseller and studied photography in Switzerland before she graduated from the Photography Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2013, and subsequently an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art in 2019. Her work takes a critical view on authorship, appropriation and the problems caused by copyright restrictions in times of digital access. Her initial explorations centred around the question – ‘Who owns the artwork?’ –from the artist’s point of view, while her more recent work shifts to focus on the broader context of copyright restrictions’ impact on cultural heritage.
This project was supported by Niio.
