Nigel Ip

With several years’ experience judging prizes on the regular, Tabish Khan was the perfect person to curate Beyond the Prize at the Mall Galleries, a show devoted to showcasing the work of recent award-winning artists. In other words, these are some of the UK’s best emerging artists in contemporary figurative art right now.

Covering a wide range of techniques including textiles and printmaking, the exhibition is quite a casual affair with an intuitive, continuous hang that groups thematically-related works in a rhythmic manner. For seasoned consumers of art, the predictability of what kinds of subject matter and how they can be represented is quite high; plenty of faces, plenty of urban and natural landscapes, with the occasional still life painting sprinkled in the middle. This is where the curatorial aspect brings fresh insights, and some of the groupings are actually quite playful, such as a succession of portraits in profile facing left, only to end with one defiantly facing the other way.

In a paired dialogue between Katarina Crawford’s Nude sculpture and Curtis Holder’s Echoes of Eshu III large coloured pencil drawing, the sinuous graphic qualities of both pieces are sensitively teased out. Meanwhile, I really enjoyed how Stephen Jacobson’s soothing Dark Cloud found solace in the woods between Toby Wiggins’ Oblation and Claire Harkess’ Sunset Song.

Some of the nicest works I saw were done with watercolours, such as Harsh Agrawal’s Organised Chaos which beautifully captured the soft evening light bouncing off the towering, ragged buildings of Hong Kong’s older districts. Meanwhile, Miranda Brookes’ layered forest vignettes almost fooled me into thinking they were photographs. To my eyes, the combination of textured paper and meticulous brushstrokes produced an effect similar to film grain in analogue photography. A similar effect can be seen in Olivia Dunn’s Penny For Your Thoughts – drawn with pastels – with its slightly fuzzy aesthetic manifested with precise blending techniques.

This is a delightful show that demonstrates figurative art still has much potential for creativity and innovation. But for me, as someone with rather traditional realist tastes, it offered consolation that there are still artists out there who can genuinely draw, paint, and sculpt well, and that these technical qualities have not been lost on the judges. As a result, one final shoutout must go to Whispers by Zahra Akbari Baseri with its remarkably strong composition and excellent finish, all done with a simple mechanical pencil.

Beyond the Prize: Celebrating Contemporary Figurative Art (16 – 26 April 2025) is at the Mall Galleries, London, https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/