A Group Exhibition of Recent MA Graduates Curated by Sir Paul Smith
New Lines
A Group Exhibition of Recent MA Graduates Curated by Sir Paul Smith
New Lines
Considered one of the most influential designers in history, Sir Paul Smith embodies the quintessence of British creativity, c u r i o s i t y, a n d e c c e n t r i c i t y. Alongside his celebrated career in fashion, he is also a passionate and discerning art collector whose long-standing engagement with contemporary art has profoundly shaped both his personal life and creative practice. As Paul explains: “Inspiration is everywhere. It could be taking photographs through a viewfinder, which teaches you to look. It could be finding inspiration in texture… it could be a Matisse painting, a movie, often it’s an artist. It’s all there if you want it.” This openness
to visual culture—the ability to draw colour from expressionist painting, transform photography into print, and translate ideas from c anvas to cloth—has underpinned the enduring vitality of the Paul Smith brand. His work has long existed within a fertile exchange between art and fashion. Art has not only informed Paul’s practice; it has also been central to his role as a collector and patron. Over several decades, Paul and his wife Pauline have assembled an impor t ant collection of contemporary art while championing generations of emerging artists. For more than thirty years, they have funded a scholarship at the Royal Academy Schools, and more
Artists Include
Isaac Andrews Lakshya Bhargava Paula Rae Grundy Anna Kurkova Jozef Michalski Robert O’Leary Marina Porta Perera Ajea Zahid
recently, through Paul Smith’s Foundation, Paul has continued to create opportunities, visibility, and support for young creatives. With his discerning eye for emerging talent, Paul Smith curates New Lines, bringing together recent MA graduates from the Royal Ac ademy Schools, the Royal College of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. Centred on painting and sculpture, the exhibition presents a diverse range of experimental and materially engaged practices, capturing the breadth, ambition, and vitalit y of contemporary art while offering a platform to some of the most compelling new voices emerging today.
About the Schools
Royal College of Art
Slade School of Fine Art
Founded in 1837, the Royal College of Art is the world’s leading art and design university. A postgraduateonly institution, it has been ranked number one in the world for a remarkable 12 consecutive years (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015-2026). The RCA’s pioneering approach champions exploration, collaboration and interdisciplinary learning beyond traditional boundaries to tackle to d ay ’s g l o b a l c h a l l e n g e s .
Founded in 1871, the Slade School of Fine Art has been at the forefront of developments in the field of contemporary art and welcomed students on our undergraduate and postgraduate courses from all over the world. Our staff and students approach contemporary art practice, and the history and theories that inform it, through experimentation, imagination and research-oriented practice. We have a lively and dynamic practice-led research culture. Staff are practising artists, writers and theorists with significant research outputs and exhibition profiles, actively involved in research and teaching.
The College continues to build the world’s most influential art and design community, with more than 30,000 alumni - a diverse, inclusive and international network of artists, designers, creators and innovators who are recognised as leaders shaping our culture and world.
Royal Academy Schools In 1768 the Royal Academy of Arts was founded to promote ‘the Arts of Design’. A key principle was the creation of the Royal Academy Schools in early 1769, a school of art established to set the standard for the training and professionalism of the next generation of artists. Today the Royal Academy Schools is an independent school of contemporary art that offers up to 17 artists each year the opportunity to participate in a free, threeyear, postgraduate programme. The RA Schools remain free and independent to this day so that places are still given to artists based on merit. Its independence enables the postgraduate programme to constantly adapt to the individual needs of each student. Discussion and debate is fuelled by a variety of lectures, artist
talks, group critiques and tutorials given by leading contemporary ar tists, Royal Academicians, critics, writers and theorists. The RA Schools is led by Louise Wilson, Jane and Louise Wilson RA, Keeper of the Royal Academy, and Eliza Bonham Carter, Curator & Director. Recent graduates of the RA Schools include Michael Armitage RA, Sung Tieu, Rachel Jones, Adham Faramawy, Rebecca Ackroyd, Jala Wahid, Roland Carline, Mary Ramsden, Prem Sahib, Lewis Hammond, Hannah Perry, Peter Linde Busk, Jenkin van Zyl, Kobby Adi and Turner Prize nominated Kira Freije, Tanoa Sasraku, Lynette YiadomBoakye and Pio Abad. For more information visit: roy.ac/raschools.
Isaac Andrews
Isaac Andrews (b. 2002, London UK) lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (2025) and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2026) in London. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the UK, including his debut solo exhibition Love Letters at Noho Galleries, London (2025) curated by Dr Matt Retallick. His work is held in private collections internationally, and he has been featured in publications including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Office Magazine, Hypebeast, and Shadowplay Magazine. 8888 Isaac Andrews explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of human connection through painting. Working primarily in oil, he constructs imagined yet familiar scenes that draw on memory, intimacy, and everyday gestures. Through depictions of intertwined hands, familial relationships, and acts of affection, Andrews examines
the ways tenderness, attachment, and vulnerability are communicated through the body. His paintings occupy a space between the personal and the universal, inviting viewers to recognise fragments of their own experiences within carefully staged moments. Responsive to both contemporary visual culture and the traditions of figurative painting, Andrews develops compositions through a process of accumulation, combining references from photography, film, literature, and personal observation. Cropped perspectives and fragmented narratives encourage close looking, while his use of paint slows the image down, transforming fleeting encounters into contemplative spaces. Through this approach, Andrews seeks to create works that resonate emotionally while remaining open to interpretation, allowing memory and feeling to become active participants in the viewing experience.
To Rely On 2026 Oil on linen
140 x 110 cm £8,400 inc VAT
Stay Here with Me 2025
Oil on canvas 180 x 180 cm
£12,000 inc VAT
Kiss 2025
Oil on canvas 120 x 95 cm
£7,800 inc VAT
Rose / In Mourning 2025
Oil on canvas 40 x 75 cm
£3,600 inc VAT
Held I 2025
Oil on canvas 45 x 60 cm
£3,300 inc VAT
Held II 2025
Oil on canvas 60 x 45 cm
£3,300 inc VAT
Lakshya Bhargava
Lakshya Bhargava, (b. 2000, Ghaziabad, India.) is an artist based in London. He completed his BVA from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru, and recently graduated with an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Bhargava has been selected for New Contemporaries 2025 and received the Cass Art Student Prize 2025. His work has been exhibited with South London Gallery, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Gallery Sumukha, Art Mumbai, Seattle Art Fair, India Art Fair, Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale, and other platforms in India and the UK. He was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2024 and the Tata Trust Students’ Biennale Award in 2022–23.
Working primarily with painting and drawing, Bhargava’s practice explores acts of caring and loving, and what it means to be human. His work often begins from lived experience; he draws his subject from memory, intimacy, friendship, and the quiet emotional weight of everyday moments. Bhargava is not interested in how someone looks, but rather what it feels like to know them. This way of working is shaped by desire, not only in a romantic sense, but as a longing for home, friendship, care, and belonging. The images return to moments that are lived, remembered, or imagined, held somewhere between experience and projection. He primarily works with painting, and often draws on canvas using acrylic, or with watercolour on paper. His work considers how colour and gesture, form and subject, can combine to create meaning, and consequently, an emotional experience for his viewer. Bhargava thinks of painting as a language, as a way of understanding the world around him through the hand rather than through the head.
Messy and Lonely 2026
Acrylic on canvas 150 x 90 cm £6,600 inc VAT
Tao in my room 2024
Acrylic on canvas 210 x 160 cm £10,200 inc VAT
Sayed and Tao 2026
Acrylic on canvas 30.5 x 45.8 cm £1,980 inc VAT
Untitled 1 2025
Watercolour on acid free paper 17.8 x 12 cm
£780 inc VAT
Untitled 2 2025
Watercolour on acid free paper 17.8 x 12 cm
£780 inc VAT
Paula Rae Grundy
Working bet ween London and Brighton, artist Paula Rae Grundy (b. 1972) recently completed her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Her practice explores materiality and embodied process, informed by an early foundation in printmaking and installation. She completed a BA in South Africa in 1992, majoring in etching and mixed media installation, and then shifted her focus toward collaboration and design, working in the design industry for nearly twenty years. Returning to her fine art practice, she has recently exhibited at Salon 0502 (2026) and Shifting Realities at the Hockney Gallery (2026). Earlier exhibitions include the Community Arts Centre, Durban (1992), National Arts Trust Exhibition, Durban (1994), and National Arts Festival, Graham’s Town (1998).
Paula Rae Grundy ’s practice reflects a renewed engagement with material experimentation and the relationship between memory, landscape, surface, and form. Through this process-led approach, she stages encounters between material, gesture, and surface that evoke embodied experience, exploring the tensions between care and disruption, repair and rupture, while tracing their connection to the landscapes of her childhood. Central to Paula’s practice is the use of fabrics associated with bodily care, birth, and protection, which she uses to draw paint through the surface. Acting as both veil and skin, the fabric becomes a permeable membrane through which paint is absorbed, resisted, and transferred.
Gathering 2026 Oil, oil stick on Linen
200 x 185 cm £6,925 inc VAT
Undergrown 2026 Oil, oil stick on Linen
185 x 200 cm £6,925 inc VAT
A Pause, Then A Whisper 2026 Oil, oil stick on Linen
80 x 100 cm £3,240 inc VAT
Temple of Unknowing 2026 Oil, oil stick on Linen
180 x 150 cm £5,880 inc VAT
Sugar 2026
Oil, oil stick on Linen
180 x 150 cm £6,120 inc VAT
Silent Storm 2026 Oil, oil stick on Linen
180 x 150 cm £6,120 inc VAT
Anna Kurkova
Originally from Belarus (b. 1994), Anna Kurkova earned her MFA with Distinction from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art (2026) and holds a BA from New York University and an MA in Art History from the Sorbonne. She is represented by Long & Ryle gallery and has a studio in North London where she investigates how painting and printmaking can fuse memory, material, and imagination into surfaces loaded with psychological and emotional resonance.
Kurkova’s practice explores painting and printmaking as ways of anchoring fleeting sensations and fragmented memories through the physical act of mark-making. She constructs imagined landscapes inhabited by alter-ego figures, folding together myth, iconography, personal experience, and ar t historical references. She paints patterned, textured surfaces that stitch figures, creatures, and space together like a painterly quilt. Working across oil painting, waterbased media, and monot ype printmaking, Kurkova combines direct paint application with monoprinting. She frequently paints onto a prepared plastic matrix before transferring the image to paper using an intaglio press. The pressure of the press disperses pigment in unpredictable ways, creating soft edges, blurred forms, and accidental marks that become integral to the final composition. The element of chance is, therefore, central to her process. Kurkova also frequently makes her own shaped wood panels, inviting the geometry of the support into conversation with the image.
Mother/Jester 2026
Monotype painting with mineral pigments: lapis lazuli, bronzite, sugilite, purpurite, amethyst,
tiger’s eye; lightfast gouache, lightfast watercolour, amethyst cabochon stones,varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 35 x 35 cm £1,380 inc VAT
Dark Side of the Road 2026
Monotype painting diptych with mineral pigments: lapis lazuli, piemontite, jadeite, rhodonite, blue apatite, fuchsite,
kyanite, zoisite, tourmaline, sugilite, purpurite, amethyst, tiger’s eye; lightfast gouache, lightfast watercolour, silver leaf gilding, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 122 x 95 cm £5,040 inc VAT
Cautioned to Surrender 2026
Monotype painting in six parts with mineral pigments: lapis lazuli, piemontite, jadeite, rhodonite,
blue apatite, fuchsite, kyanite, zoisite, tourmaline; lightfast gouache, lightfast watercolour, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 182.5 x 185 cm £7,680 inc VAT
Wave 2026
Monotype painting with mineral pigments blue apatite, hematite, red and
green fuchsite, lightfast gouache, lightfast watercolour, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 78 x 154 cm £4,080 inc VAT
Waiting for the Miracle 2025
Monotype painting with mineral pigments, lightfast gouache,
lightfast watercolour, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 35 x 45 cm £1,440 inc VAT
A Kind of Prayer 2026
Monotype painting diptych with mineral pigments: hematite, bronzite, yavapai,
red and green fuchsite, lightfast gouache, lightfast watercolour, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 67 x 82 cm £3,240 inc VAT
Gardener 2026
Monotype painting with mineral pigments, lightfast gouache,
lightfast watercolour, 24ct gold leaf gilding, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on marine plywood board 50 x 67 cm £2,580 inc VAT
1000 Winds that Blow 2025
Monotype painting with lightfast gouache, lightfast
watercolour, varnish, cold wax on Fabriano Unica paper mounted on plywood board 42 x 67 cm £1,920 inc VAT
Jozef Michalski
Jozef Michalski (b. 1999) is an AnaCartographer working within the post-digital condition. His practice operates through painting, imagefield construction, and computational imaging processes that layer environmental scans, photographic capture, and indexed data to generate image surfaces. He recently completed his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art and now working with Snap Inc. on an AR-based imaging project that extends Ana-Cartographic methods into spatial and augmented environments. His work has been exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, and the United States, including at the Royal College of Art, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, and Café Moskau, Berlin.
Michalski’s works begin with specific sites facing ecological pressure. In Naples, Michalski climbed cliffs at night to record cicadas beneath constant machine noise. In the Tabernas Desert, he photographed re m o t e a rc h a e o l o g i c a l and anthropological sites where Aleppo pines were dying under drought pressure. Michalski altered these files through sound, data damage and print, then built them back into surface with binders and layered material. The series comes from painting’s current condition: an age where the work is often encountered first as a file, image, reproduction, post, scan or screen. Michalski’s “Fake Paintings” draw focus to the image after capture, circulation, corruption and return. In AN_ATLAS, landscape becomes a sedimented visual field where ecological damage, data degradation and material surface are held together.
A Terminal Field (An Atlas): Japanese Garden 2026 Fake Painting (wallpaper, binders and a bioplastic
UV-resistant surface coating, mounted on wooden panel) 201.2 × 300.1 cm £15,220 inc VAT
Head of Venus (An Atlas) 2026
Fake Installation (Ceramic) 49 × 17 x 33 cm £1,104 inc VAT
Atlas11-25_I(Cng) 2026
Fake Painting (wallpaper, binders and a bioplastic UV-resistant surface coating, mounted on wooden panel)
199.7 × 123.9 cm £9,720 inc VAT
Atlas11-25_II(Cng) 2026
Fake Painting (wallpaper, binders and a bioplastic, UV-resistant surface coating, mounted on wooden panel)
200.3 × 127.1 cm £9,780 inc VAT
Atlas10.1 2026
Fake Painting (wallpaper, binders and a bioplastic, UV-resistant surface coating, mounted on wooden panel)
180.2 × 137.5 cm £6,180 inc VAT
Robert O’Leary
Robert O’Leary (b.1995, London) is a British and American artist. He studied at Chelsea College of Arts and Camberwell College of Arts before graduating from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2026. He is the recipient of the RA Schools’ Paul Smith Foundation Scholarship (202326) and the Prado Ford Foundation Scholarship (2024). His work has also recently been acquired by The Roberts Institute of Art and The Paul Smith Foundation.
Robert O’Leary figurative sculptures and installations consider the psychological space that exists between our intentions and our actions. O’Leary is curious about the potential of sculpture to critique notions of purity and morality, questioning grey areas and complex social structures.
Bird and a Lying Boy 2026
Hand-cast glass, brass, steel
Edition of 4 + 1 Artist’s Proof / 14 x 6 x 4 cm £2,905 inc VAT
The Forcibly Bewitched 2026
Hand-cast glass, brass, steel
Edition of 4 + 1 Artist’s Proof / 8 x 18 x 4 cm £2,785 inc VAT
Improbable 2026
Hand-cast glass, brass, steel Edition of 4 + 1 Artist’s Proof / 11 x 6 x 4 cm £2,785 inc VAT
Before Rothenberg 2026
Bronze, paint
Unique / 4 x 6 x 5 cm £1,875 inc VAT
Needle[s] 2026
Bronze
Edition of 4 + 1 Artist’s Proof / 16 x 12 x 7 cm £1,220 inc VAT
The Seduction of Recognition 2026
Bronze
Edition of 4 + 1 Artist’s Proof / 6 x 4 x 8 cm £1,270 inc VAT
The Band 2026
Hand-cast glass, two bronze pieces Unique / 19 x 15 x 12 cm £2,890 inc VAT
Marina Porta Perera
Marina Porta Perera (b. 1995) is an artist from Barcelona currently based in London. She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2026, and a BFA in Visual Communication Design at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2019.
Marina’s practice begins with images drawn from personal archives and found photographs. She approaches the archive as a site where the ordinary and the overlooked become charged with possibility. Through image transfer and oil paint, Marina explores the photograph as both document and material object, using paint to extend, obscure and interrupt the transferred image. Her compositions emerge through a careful negotiation between presence and absence - revealing and concealing - as the image transforms beyond its original meaning. Her works resist a fixed sense of completion. Each composition remains an open proposition, questioning whether an image can ever be complete, or whether it is always in the process of becoming.
Untitled (Key) 2026
Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
130 x 160 cm £5,040 inc VAT
Untitled (Red Vase) 2026
Image Transfer, Canvas, Thread and Oil on Plywood
90 x 60 cm £1,800 inc VAT
Untitled (Grey vase) 2026 Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
41 x 51 cm £1,140 inc VAT
Home is in the pocket 2026 Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
20 x 25 cm £780 inc VAT
What did you say to the Flowers I 2026 Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
20 x 25 cm £780 inc VAT
What did you say to the Flowers II 2026 Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
20 x 25 cm £780 inc VAT
What did you say to the Flowers III 2026 Image Transfer and Oil on Plywood
20 x 25 cm £780 inc VAT
Ajea Zahid
Ajea Zahid (b.2000. Karachi) is a visual artist, from Lahore, Pakistan currently based in London UK. Zahid graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and recently completed her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Zahid has been awarded the Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize 2026 and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant 2025. Her notable exhibitions include; Untitled Art Miami Beach - Miami, Frieze 9 Cork Street, 55 Eastcastle Street - London, Pristine Contemporary – India , Muscat Art Oman, Tanzara Gallery, O art Space, Gallery 6 and NumaishGah Lahore. Zahid has also worked as a member of Our Shared Cultural Heritage - A youth-led project exploring the shared cultures and histories between UK and South Asia.
Ajea Zahid’s practice is rooted in movement and observation. Early recollections of displacement meant renegotiating ideas of home and belonging. Zahid learned to observe people and places she knew would be temporary. In many ways, painting has become her way to hold onto the transient, slow down the act of seeing, and make sense of impermanence. For Zahid, painting as a practice begins with sketches of observational lines. The idea is concrete in the ‘feeling’ of a drawing, an intuition evolving naturally into painting, where the paint itself leads the direction of the work. Zahid remains interested in small, often overlooked interactions that reveal something fragile about human connection. Her works examine what it means to be together yet apart, displaced but still belonging.
They’ve All Waited for Something That Never Happened 2026
Oil on Canvas 120 x 180 cm
£6,130 inc VAT
You Will Pay Attention to Anything But the Floor 2026
Oil on Canvas 160 x 200 cm
£7,730 inc VAT
Founded in 2024, Paul Smith Space is a gallery space dedicated to presenting artwork that reflects Paul Smith’s ethos of championing creativity, curiosity and the unexpected. Its permanent home is at the Paul Smith No.9 Albemarle Street shop in London, alongside a programme of exhibitions presented across Paul Smith locations around the world. The programme evolves throughout the year, introducing an ever-changing selection of artists and artworks that share Paul Smith’s spirit of individuality, discovery and creative expression.
For all art enquiries please contact: art@paulsmith.co.uk Katie Heller Art & Exhibitions Manager katie.heller@paulsmith.co.uk Audrey Dennis Gallery Assistant audrey.dennis@paulsmith.co.uk Paul Smith 9 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BL +44 (0)7553 352 959 +44 (0) 207 493 4565
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