ARTISTS | D Contemporary

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D CONTEMPORARY

ARTISTS

Schoony makes mostly figurative sculpture. His best-known recurring motif is a shirtless boy soldier wearing an oversized military helmet, and he builds his pieces using detailed life-casting techniques in materials such as plastic, bronze, and gold. His work blends commercialism, violence, and kitsch to examine how detached contemporary Western society has become from the reality of war. He combines up-to-date technology with more traditional methods.

SCHOONY

Bargiotas has fabricated myths and drawn them since childhood, and the practice has never really changed shape — only subject. The paintings and drawings assemble private cosmologies from material that is emphatically contemporary: the language of data protection and storage, the imagery of genetics and inheritance, the residue of a decade spent in law. Titles like THEOGONY and The Digital Messiah set the machinery of classification and record-keeping alongside the older myths of creation and deliverance, treating both as systems for explaining where a person comes from and what happens to them.

THEO BARGIOTAS

Caitlin Heffernan is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, site-specific installation and soft sculpture. Her practice explores social histories, place and materiality, often uncovering overlooked narratives embedded within architectural spaces, collections and objects.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s MA Painting programme, Heffernan has exhibited across the UK and Europe and undertaken commissions and residencies with organisations including Metal Arts, Somerset Art Works, the Jerwood Drawing Prize, the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm and Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. In Autumn 2026, she will undertake a residency at the Rothko Museum in Latvia.

She is also co-director, curator and artist of Unravelled, developing site-responsive projects within historic houses and collections.

CAITLIN HEFFERNAN

Marc-Aurèle Debut works across sculpture, installation and sound, creating environments in which bodily presence is articulated through repetition, pressure, accumulation and material tension. Drawing from lived experience within queer cultures and social spaces, his practice examines how desire, intimacy and power become embedded within objects, surfaces and systems of circulation.

Working with materials including upholstery foam, leather, latex, resin, springs, pharmaceuticals, supplements and found garments, Debut uses processes of casting, stretching, stitching and assembly to construct forms that shift between attraction and discomfort, softness and control. Repetition operates both as a material strategy and a conceptual framework through which bodies, emotions and desires are organised, circulated and consumed.

MARC-AURÈLE DEBUT

Liu Wenqi is a self-taught ceramic artist whose practice is grounded in research, material experimentation and a sustained investigation into process. Working primarily with liquid porcelain, she integrates colour directly into the material before introducing gravure and surface interventions that extend the relationship between image, matter and time.

Her work explores existence, memory, temporality and transformation, approaching porcelain as a medium through which sensation and duration can be held in suspension. Through a process of testing, observation and gradual discovery, Liu creates works that evoke fragments of lived experience and archives of feeling, reflecting on what persists, what changes and what ultimately disappears.

LIU WENQI

Zhang’s practice uses abstraction to explore how identity is formed through relationships with others. His work considers the self not as something fixed or autonomous, but as something continually shaped through encounter, distance, friction and trust.

Through processes of accumulation, interruption, erasure and revision, Zhang approaches the canvas as a space in which emotion remains suspended rather than explicitly described. His paintings move between intimacy and resistance, attachment and separation, presence and absence, examining the unstable and relational nature of human connection.

GUANGYU ZHANG

Sun Xiaolan transforms West Lake into a fluid, fleeting landscape, capturing trees, hills and sky as fragmented reflections on rippling water.

Her practice explores three states of matter: liquid through her water paintings, texture through botanical works on ramie—a traditional Chinese cloth woven by generations of women—and touch through hand-built ceramic vessels. Together, the works connect nature, material and the long tradition of women’s observation of the natural world.

SUN XIAOLAN

Lau Yee Vanessa Fong is a London-based visual artist who recently graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. She graduated from the Art Center College of Design with a BFA in Fine Art in 2021. Her art, deeply rooted in Buddhist and Eastern philosophy, explores a personal journey of spiritual self-healing and interprets ancient philosophies in a contemporary light.

LAU YEE VANESSA FONG

Laura Holmes (b. 2000, Norwich) is a British painter based in London whose practice explores the material and conceptual possibilities of painting. Working primarily with oil and oilstick, she develops large-scale canvases through an intuitive process in which colour, memory, observation and gesture converge.

Holmes’ work investigates the relationship between control and spontaneity, treating painting as both a physical substance and a space for continual experimentation. She graduated from the Royal College of Art’s Painting programme in 2023, following a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at De Montfort University. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across the UK and is held in private and public collections in the UK, the Netherlands and Nigeria.

LAURA HOLMES

Silke Weißbach (b. 1984, Germany) is a London-based artist whose practice moves between painting, sculpture and material experimentation. Her work explores ecological systems, collective intelligence and the relationship between human and non-human forms of perception, often using unconventional and bio-responsive materials to question how matter carries memory, agency and transformation.

Weißbach studied Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2020. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Paul Smith Foundation, Spinnerei Leipzig and Hauser & Wirth London. In 2025, she received the Winsor & Newton and Paul Smith Foundation Art Prize and completed the Imagination Fellowship at Arizona State University.

SILKE WEIßBACH

Mister Papercut is a contemporary artist working across collage and street art. His practice examines human behaviour, morality and social contradiction through simplified, often faceless figures that operate as anonymous and universal stand-ins for the individual.

Combining playful visual language with darker psychological and social themes, his works explore the shifting relationship between vice and virtue, addressing subjects including excess, violence, desire and moral ambiguity. Through layered compositions and visual storytelling, Mister Papercut invites viewers to reflect on the structures and impulses that shape collective behaviour. His work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations in London, Miami, New York and Taiwan.

MISTER PAPERCUT

Seçil Erel is a Turkish-British artist based between London and Istanbul whose practice is centred on abstraction and the relationship between perception, imagination and the unknown. Through her paintings, she explores the space between the visible world and what lies beyond it, inviting viewers to engage intuitively through thought, feeling and personal association.

Erel holds both a BA and MA in Painting from Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts. Her work has been presented internationally through solo and group exhibitions, art fairs, residencies, symposiums and collaborative projects. In 2016, the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts published a monograph dedicated to her practice.

SEÇIL EREL

Neal Camilleri (b. 1999) is a Maltese contemporary artist and ceramic sculptor based in London. His work explores memory, childhood, belonging, identity, and the landscapes and material culture of Malta. Working between Malta and London, he transforms familiar objects and landscapes into playful, expressive forms. Clay is his primary medium, often combined with wood, metal, and resin. Camilleri studied Ceramics at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited internationally in London, Ireland, New York, and Malta. His work is held in private collections across the UK, Europe, and the United States.

NEAL CAMILLERI

Mariandrie is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines gender, identity, memory and cultural inheritance. Working at the intersection of seemingly opposing states — masculine and feminine, self and other, rigidity and softness, past and present — she creates hybrid forms that challenge established binaries and question how personal and collective identities are constructed.

Her work moves between craft and fine art, using material and process to reconsider inherited social and cultural narratives. By bringing contrasting elements into dialogue, Mariandrie creates spaces for ambiguity, negotiation and transformation, proposing more inclusive understandings of belonging, representation and cultural heritage.

MARIANDRIE

Rômulo Avi is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based between London and São Paulo. His practice explores image-making, memory and transformation through an ongoing process of material experimentation, drawing on philosophy, mythology and literature.

Working through successive acts of brushing, sanding, digging, coating and erasure, Avi approaches the surface as an active and evolving space. Forms are revealed, obscured and reconfigured through a continual negotiation between intention and chance, allowing imagined landscapes and psychological states to emerge. His works retain a sense of instability and transformation, with the process of making remaining deliberately open and responsive to the behaviour of the materials themselves.

RÔMULO AVI

Nelson Hernandez is a Chilean painter born in Patagonia and based in London. His practice explores the effects of globalisation on memory, identity and cultural specificity, informed by the contrast between his upbringing in one of the world’s most remote regions and his current position within an international art capital.

Working with oil and acrylic on canvas and wooden panel, Hernandez combines painting with photogrammetry and 3D modelling. He digitally captures cultural fragments — from historical artefacts and museum objects to toys and elements of contemporary visual culture — before reassembling them into fragmented compositions. Through painting, these disparate references are brought into new relationships, examining how cultural identities are preserved, transformed or dissolved within an increasingly globalised visual language.

NELSON HERNANDEZ

Eva Brá Barkardóttir is an Icelandic artist based in London whose practice engages with ecology, collective thinking and alternative visions of the future. Working across artistic, curatorial and spatial projects, she explores how non-anthropocentric perspectives can generate new ways of imagining relationships between people, environments and future ecosystems.

Barkardóttir holds a BA in Fashion Design from the Iceland Academy of the Arts and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts. She is a member of Seed 2065, a collective developing speculative and hopeful narratives around future ecologies, and is the founder and co-founder of several artist-led and curatorial initiatives, including Anddyri Reykjavík and In-house Art. Her work has been exhibited in London and internationally and is held in private collections in the UK, Iceland and Germany.

EVA BRÁ BARKARDÓTTIR

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