Lydia Blakeley UK, b. 1980

Lydia Blakeley's subject matter is the world around her, or rather the world translated through the screen of her cameraphone or her laptop. She constantly records or screenshots what interests her in the flux of visual imagery that she is surrounded by. She then uses that source material to make paintings that have a viewpoint that superficially might resemble her source material but on closer inspection interrogates questions around aspiration, commercialism and the artificiality of social media. Her subject matter ranges widely but is linked through the idea of what we are told we should aspire to. Perfect holidays, immaculate teeth, television shows of what constitutes hip food, streetwear, the esoteric world of best-in-show pets.

Blakeley's process of making paintings of such seemingly disparate subject matter has an effect of filtering those subjects through a particular sensibility. The rapidness and overwhelming nature of visual culture is slowed, perhaps even momentarily stilled, by the process of selection and the act of painting. Blakeley often close crops a particular part of the image that she is working from, and then starts with a pink underpainting. From there she makes a chalk pastel sketch on top of the underpainting, adds a wash of colour, and then returns to work on details. There is an evenness to the surface of her paintings that results from the consistency of this technique but this process also brings out a certain evenness of gaze that is dispassionate, deadpan and cool.

Since completing her MFA at Goldsmiths College in 2019 her career has progressed strongly; from group shows to solo shows at commercial galleries, and from her first major institutional group show at the Hayward Gallery (curated by Ralph Rugoff) in 2021, to her first institutional solo last year at Southwark Park Galleries.