Artists’ Profiles 2021

Selecting works for the Aesthetica Art Prize is an inspirational and enlightening experience. There are so many artists worldwide creating pieces that need to be seen. Below is an image and short synopsis from each 2021 longlisted artist.

Photographic & Digital Art

Alice Duncan

Black Hole was created at Lake Mungo, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Barkandji / Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa people.

Amelia Kosminsky

Hungariana is a series of stills taken from a video installation created for the Barbican. Using 1900s photographs, Kosminsky creates an atmosphere.

Anna Carey

Anna Carey is an Australian artist whose work is based on travelling to foreign places and encountering familiar architectural spaces.

Bianca Artopé

What do we believe in? Have consumption and technology become our new substitute religions? What world are we creating?

Brendan Dawes

Black Mamba’s Revenge uses AI and machine learning to visualise the final fight scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. One.

Carlos David

Personae II is an exploration of the human spirit, as expressed through dreams, fantasy and imagination; it opens a new path for dialogue.

Celine Marie

A Metamorfose do Corpo started out as an idea for a solo performance acting as live self-portrait, with the artist covered in different body paint.

Christiane Zschommler

The images in The Will of the People are based on spectrograms of speeches by the British government, headlines in the media and the artist’s own writing.

Clarence Lin

Clarence Lin is an artist based in the US. Tokyo, Night in Taiwan depicts the views of sprawling urban landscapes alongside gentle intimate moments.

Costas Picadas

BIOPHILIA is comprised of video projections that examine the phenomenon of DNA and the transfer of information via cell division.

David Brandy

David Brandy’s passion as an artist is to capture man-altered landscapes with a sense of “the uncanny”, something strangely familiar.

David Zimmerman

The current political atmosphere in the US is a well-considered agenda. Delusions and divisions provoke fear, suspicion and injustice.

Dawn Parsonage

Is it possible to capture unfiltered emotion when the sitter is aware the camera is watching? The artist devised experiments to instil boredom.

Dina Goldstein

Modern Girl looks at commercialism and identity, creating satirical ad campaigns based upon famous advertising posters 1930s Shanghai, China.

Dirk Hardy

With Vivarium, Dirk Hardy welcomes us to a multitude of worlds. Through constructed tableaus, Hardy explores the complexity of our zeitgeist.

dror/forshée

dror/forshée started photography as a way to provide commentary on social, political and economic issues, social media and its role in society.

Edwin Mingard

Edwin Mingard is a visual artist making socially-engaged work. An Intermission was made with young people experiencing homelessness.

Eli Dijkers

Eli Dijkers explores humanity as he experiences it. His images appeal to sensory perception – an abstract world in which light and darkness coexist.

Enzo Crispino

Enzo Crispino’s work is a study of 19th century English Vedutism and its the two greatest exponents, William Turner and John Constable.

Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç

Evelyn Bencicova a visual artist with background in new media studies; her practice combines academic research with contemporary culture.

Francesca Pompei

Francesca Pompei captures the urban landscape as dominated by simplicity and an austere visual clarity; the images come from careful deliberation.

G Roland Biermann

2020 is a series of photographs and sculptural installations. It is inspired, not so much by the current pandemic itself, as by its universal effects.

Geoff Titley

With the expanding role of the screen in our world, the lines between the artificiality of technology and the reality of nature become blurred.

Giulia Baita

What magic does art create when we observe it? A colour or a line in the right place can open a world within us. This has always fascinated Baita.

Heather McDonough

There are 4000 images arranged in stacks, made during a process of archiving between 1980 and 2005. The volume is a monument to photography.

Héloïse Bergman

These portraits are exposed directly onto New Zealand leaves using the plants’ chlorophyll as a natural, alternative image-making process.

Julia SH

Julia SH’s Heavenly Bodies is a collection of fine art images that challenges the usual body types seen and recognised by 21st century media.

Julian D’Arcy

Julian D’Arcy’s mesmerising works delight the viewer with the formal structuring principle of photographic chiaroscuro, bathed in light.

Lexi Laine

Lexi Laine specialises in creating ethereal and eerie underwater photography, taken in unique locations around the globe.

Luciana Abait

These eerie psychological landscapes critically reflect upon human beings and their fraught relationship with the organic world today.

Magdalena Wittchen

Wittchen explores the role of the streets in contemporary life – a modern universe in motion. Awake! considers the female presence in the metropolis.

Marco Sanges

Abyss is an analogue project full of colours and dreams, where saturation transports the viewer into another, magical universe.

Michael Schwan

Humans leave footprints and traces everywhere, visible years later. Michael Schwan’s photography offers an insight into the beauty of nature.

Monica Alcazar-Duarte

The images presented are an ongoing project on how algorithms are used through search engine technology to support and maintain biased thinking.

Natalie Lennard

Birth Undisturbed is a fictional narrative series travelling through the world and history to depict birth from ancient to modern, real and imagined.

Nicola Bertellotti

In The world without us and Resilient sky, there is a continuous search for modern-day ruins, capturing dystopian and abandoned places.

NPier

These pictures describe staircases where materials are imposing and excessive. Viewers are invited into a different universe; a world of silence.

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s series explores the mediated relationship to the body and self-image as experienced in contemporary digitised culture.

Roman Robroek

Control depicts a 100 year old power plant that is still providing power to a large city nearby. These photos capture something that has been lost.

Ruby Pluhar

For Living Colour, the vast desert of New Mexico was animated through the rhythmic movement of bodies in saturated colours.

Seb Agnew

Syncope deals with the feeling of “being disoriented”: Again, and again, we lose track of what is happening around us and experience disconnect.

Todd Antony

Bolivia’s cholitas luchadoras began practicing in the early 2000s, when a group of women were inspired by Mexico’s lucha libre style of wrestling.

Tom Atwood

Kings & Queens in Their Castles has been called one of the most ambitious photo series ever conducted of the LGBTQ experience in the USA.

Zsofia Daniel

’31 is concerned with the societal development of western cultures. It explores the parallels between the early 1930s and present-day reality.


Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture

Cathryn Shilling

Human interaction, interplay and movement are at the core of this work, exploring reality, performance and the nuisances between them.

Eric Forman

Forman works at the intersection of fine art, design, architecture and technology. Dis/Connect is a sculpture that confronts pervasive connectivity.

Gary LaPointe Jr

carhartt hat arch was cast in concrete and placed in tension by the tips of the brims, creating a completed arch and a meaningful sensual embrace.

Henny Burnett

365 Days of Plastic is an installation and sculpture that is cast in pink dental plaster. It demonstrates one year’s worth of plastic food packaging.

James Tapscott

The re-presentation of a familiar material – something taken for granted – allows us to re-examine our experience with the everyday.

Karen Browning

A contrast of matt black glass and 24 carat gold leaf records a moment in time – the blasting energy from a rifle shot. Gold leaf bursts open.

Lenia Mascha

Lenia Mascha’s Manifolds are sculptures which grow as an intuitively driven computer-aided gesture of spiral-like twists and folds of geometry.

Monroe Isenberg

Earthwomb is a response to living and working in Seydisfjordur, Iceland — to the feeling of roundness in the fjord, and the sense of cycle.

Richard Mackness

Richard Mackness’ work often deals with opposites: ancient / modern and worthless / priceless. Domus echoes packaged goods and classical drapery.

Verena Bachl

Wave Fragment is a kinetic light sculpture that displays flow fields by the reflection of light, inspired by the movement of water.

Yuji Okitsu

Yuji Okitsu highlights the momentary changes of natural light that shift with time, sharpening audiences’ perceptions.


Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media

Andrew Leventis

Andrew Leventis’ series considers vanitas in a modern-day circumstance, which really came to light when the pandemic hit in March 2020.

Camila Quintero

Inspired by the Bauhaus, the the painting Winter Blues explores the way in which we perceive our surroundings and the interpretation of observations.

Constance Regardsoe

The intricate patterns in Trapped Light speak of transience.The figure and the light are enmeshed together in water and preserved in the painting.

Emma May Riley

Emma Atkinson creates still-life realism paintings. The works all have a common theme, to connect with simple pleasures that are overlooked.

Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson’s still life studies focus on people’s hobbies and passions, as well as their collections of material things: books, objects and records.

Ignacio Barrios

The idea behind these drying racks is to represent – in one cohesive image – the sense of liquidity and humidity present in colours.

Jae young Park

Woolscape is a record of everyday life told through a series of lines. Park asks questions about people connected to each other in society.

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard

During the first Coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, the artist created a series of works using hand sanitiser on thermal paper.

Seungjo Jeong

Mundane objects that are encountered every day are at the heart of Jeong’s practice. They are distilled to look like a post-painterly abstract painting.

Sharon McDonagh

This series is a powerful, brutally honest reflection of the artist’s life. McDonagh’s home has been her safe haven, and the Hoover symbolises this.

Soo Hyeon Kim

Parasitic Residue is a series made by itself, as the organism in the ecosystem constructed next to it grows. During its growth, it splashes wax onto a surface.

Zara Matthews

Shelved is a series of paintings made of objects found in abandoned rooms and vacant apartments. They act as reminders of past inhabitants.


Installation & Performance

Aisling Ward

The Path of a Single Thread combines performance, video and print. The multimedia work explores East Midlands lace manufacturing.

Anuar Portugal

Junín comprises an arrangement of nine identical wooden chairs. The piece is a metaphor about how “similar” places are not the same.

Audrey Briot

Briot’s Stymphalian Birds is an art installation in which complex haptic interactions with feathers are sonified in acoustic soundscapes.

Buşra Tunç

Buşra Tunç often considers structures containing remnants and memories from industrial spaces and crowded cities, working with everyday materials.

Cesar & Lois

By crossing technological and biological systems, Cesar & Lois probes humanity’s relationship to nature, creating interactive artwork.

Chris Combs

Facial recognition features in Morale is Mandatory, which uses a camera to detect smiling faces, referencing the rise of algorithmic surveillance.

Eric Fong

Eric Fong is a multimedia artist exploring issues relating to the body, identity and vulnerability in the context of biomedicine and forensics.

Erwin Redl

Reflections culminates a decade of research into the nature of visual perception. The works are strongly tied to the aesthetics of Minimal Art.

Hannah Scott

Beginning in June 2018, the artist shed all of her material possessions and set off by bicycle around the UK and New Zealand, taking only what she needed.

Jacek Ludwig Scarso

How power is linked to the way we use space, and how we relate to each other within it? The Pecking Order revolves around surveillance and CCTV.

Jakob Steensen

Catharsis is a large-scale, immersive installation that pulls audiences into a digital simulation of a re-imagined old-growth forest.

Jean-Philippe Côté

The Binôme series is an interactive work driven by algorithms. Côté’s subject is the human body, rendered through micro or macro lenses.

Julie Groves

Julie Groves’ Proximity is about confronting sound and the way it entangles us – the self and the other – in a dual upsurge of information.

Justin Wiggan

Internal Garden enables individuals with complex disabilities to explore and connect with UK plant collections through vibration sequences.

Lab212

Lab212 is an interdisciplinary art collective, creating immersive installations which explore our perceptions of space and sound.

Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent

Every Thought there Ever Was considers how schizophrenia relates to the hallucinatory technology that is present in everyday life.

Margarida Sardinha

Margarida Sardinha’s installation comprises AR and large-scale anamorphic optical illusions visually patterned with Portuguese tiles.

Mo Zareei

Material Music celebrates the role of materiality in the arts. The installation consists of an array of eight kinetic sound-sculptures.

Niya B

Niya B’s explores ecology, posthumanism and (trans)gender politics. The work draws a parallel of female subjectivities and nature.

Olivia Louvel

The Sculptor Speaks is a ‘resounding’ of a 1961 tape by Barbara Hepworth. Louvel applies principles of sculpture to her voice to manipulate its texture.

Peter Hudson

In Colour is an interactive, immersive and inclusive light installation where people intuitively explore non-verbal communication and expression.

Pietro Marullo

How do human groups react when they face a big danger? On stage, a huge inflatable pillow-like object moves across the stage, like a predator.

Samir Bhowmik

Circuit Breaker is a networked participatory installation that critiques today’s culture of constant connectivity. It reflects on our digital lives.

Simone Fezer

A range of materials are used in Fezer’s performances. Glass, mirrors, steel, mixed-media, photography and video reflect the inside out and outside in.

Steve Messam

Hush was a temporary art installation in the remote landscape of County Durham, UK. Over 600 yellow flags fill a man-made scar in the landscape.

Studio Above&Below

Digital Atmosphere is a Mixed Reality sculpture combining air pollution data and Augmented Reality to give the environment a voice.

Tobias Zarfl

A paper web unrolls and pulls its traces through a forest. Living in Vienna, Zarfl is a digital creative, focusing on film and motion design.

Yifeat Ziv

The Echo of Our Breath is a CO2 sensor-based installation, comprised of sound and video materials captured in the Amazon rainforest.

Video & Artists’ Film

Aleks Stanek

Every Body is Heavy brings to digital life two distinct ambiguous entities, targeted by an anti-virus scan within a drone surveillance system.

Ana Vaz, Paulo Quedas and Ricardo Martins

Three artists blend forms of performative arts to arrive at new frontiers. They believe that, in the space we are living, is the idea of a museum.

Andy Holmes

Evidence shows the evolutionary survival system incentivises – with pleasure – the processing of visual information. system II plays with this.

Arthur Kleinjan

Above Us Only Sky begins with an investigation into a plane crash in communist Czechoslovakia, in which one woman survived.

Avner Pinchover

Riot Glass alludes to shatterproof glass, designed to withstand violence. The artist stands behind a huge glass partition, endlessly throwing stones.

Ben Cullen Williams

The artist collaborated with Google Arts and Culture to create abstract visuals of AI-generated choreography to explore dance as code.

Catherine Bertola

In the Between Space was filmed in an underground servants’ passageway in a stately home. Choreographed dancers recall the rhythm of workers’ industry.

Elise Guillaume

Elise Guillaume is concerned with the current state of the environment, and she explores the complex relationship with natural environment.

Gabriel Andreu

This film is an homage to the artist’s mother. Amelia celebrates her 80th birthday; there isn’t a better time to review her story.

Gabriel Hensche

Gabriel Hensche’s performance, moving image and installation deal with the question of how internet and digital technology affect the way we coexist.

Gjert Rognli

Gjert Rognli’s film shows the way in a world undergoing rapid change, with polarisation and globalisation going in many directions.

Henry Bradley

Frenulum dramatises a real-life operation, following eight children as they perform imaginary tongue surgery on a member of their group.

Henry Wolff

Siblings in particular carry our histories like imperfect reflections. Henry Wolff’s film features physical interpretations of this support.

Juliana Kasumu

Promoted by intimate conversations, Kasumu questions the production of identity as it relates to personal affiliations with past and present.

Kitoko Diva

The Black Man in The Cosmos is a poetic and experimental art film that mixes new forms of Afrofuturism, cyberspace imagery and poetry.

Lyndsay Martin

The Grown-ups Are Talking examines the emotional consequences of adult relationships as they unravel within the confines of the home.

Mandy Eugeniou

The starting point for The Black Tower was to crowd-source aftermath images of Grenfell Tower, looking at concepts of memorialisation.

Max Colson

The Knowledge of London is the study of over London street routes and thousands of places of interest. Two taxi drivers recount their experience.

Nicky Hamilton

Fourteen is a surreal look into the mental state of the artist’s teenage son and the sudden lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Özlem Sariyildiz

Your Body Must Be Heard is the artist’s response to the fixing of her body in certain identities and homelands, as a new migrant in Germany.

Robert Gorman

Robert Gorman’s video explores the idea of fearlessness, as it relates to survival. The artist captured seabirds in-flight as they searched for prey.

Shan Wu

A Taiwanese woman’s journey to America reveals her fantasy and an identity entangled with beauty, sexuality, nationality and language.

Sophie Huckfield

Break the Frame incorporates contemporary and traditional processes such as puppetry and a CNC machine to deconstruct “progress.”

Susan J Chen

Time Goes By is a short video shot in quarantine during the first lockdown in southern California. It is a meditative and reflective look at time.

Sven Windszus

Windszus engages with the idea that, although we have recognised the problem of overpopulation, it is not usually reflected in our actions.

Yanzhi Xiong

Little Green is filmed in Dong Village, Guizhou, China. Six people are being filmed by a drone, exploring the legendary history of a boulder.