Our winner from Antwerp, Laura Basterra Sanz creates gestural abstract paintings where movement, intuition, and materiality converge, building layered, textured surfaces that reveal traces of her physical engagement with the canvas. Her colour palette is rich and dynamic, guided by an organic sense of composition rather than a predetermined structure.
In Copenhagen, Silke Weißbach’s practice is rooted at the intersection of material alchemy, emotional resonance, and ecological awareness. Her paintings, sculptures, and video installations operate as living systems - environments where biological agents and intangible elements such as light, colour, fragrance, liquids, language, and memory are combined and shaped through slow transformation. Substances such as spirulina, hyaluronic acid, sugar, formula milk, seaweed and wax act as active agents, initiating processes of crystallisation, fermentation, decomposition, and evaporation. Chosen for their metaphorical resonance and transformative capacities, these materials think, shift, and destabilise.
Currently in London, is our winner Charlotte Winifred Guérard. Currently undertaking her final year at the Royal Academy of Arts School as a Paul Smith’s Foundation scholar. Her practice centres around painting and the ways in which those can be viewed, activated and displayed. Her work explores the notions of painting in space and paintings in motion while the narrative of her images is influenced by her immediate surroundings, landscapes, the everyday and memory.
Cecilia Lamptey-Botchway, originally from Ghana, is our New York winner. A mixed media visual artist producing contemporary African art, versed in figurative painting, performance, abstraction and textile making. She epicycles mopping cotton/wool fibres and invites the viewer to explore the versatility of contemporary African women in her textured portraits. Her practice also encompasses ideas about gender roles and womanhood, crafting works and performances that comment on societal challenges she and her fellow African women face.
In Nottingham, Michelle Heron is an urban landscape painter from Norfolk, England. Working in acrylic she is known primarily for her paintings that immortalise the many threatened independent shops that make our high streets what they are. Her work has been compared with Edward Hopper & George Shaw for her sensitive use of light and the way her paintings capture the mood and emotion of a place. Her paintings have been featured in the likes of The Guardian and The Londonist.
Our winner from Shanghai, Lisa Zhongwen Hu, is a painter, illustrator and animator. Her work emphasises scenes of positive energy - joy, tranquility, love - that spring up in the seemingly mundane motions of everyday life. Brining emotional sensitivity to the canvas, her work can be found in galleries, books and commercial products.
Stay tuned as we look forward to presenting the artists works in the coming months!