Mariota Spens is a Scottish-Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art in 2016 and has exhibited regularly since then.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
Villains & Thieves, The Landing Gallery, Tottenham, London, April 2023
Calamity, The Landing Gallery, Tottenham, London, October 2021
Muscle Beach, Husk Gallery, Limehouse, London, January 2016
Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Dolphin Gallery, Oxford, March 2016
Group exhibitions
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019 (formerly The Jerwood Prize, touring exhibition):
October 2019 - January 2020 - The Salisbury Museum, Salisbury, UK
18th January - 1st February 2020, Trinity Buoy Wharf Gallery, London, UK
21st February - 18th April 2020; 31st August-25th September 2020 The Leicester Gallery, Leicester, UK
HEALING: the Mind, the Body and the Image Today, The Bloomsbury Gallery, London May 2019
Matiere, Cobalt Gallery, Pittenweem, Scotland, March 2016
Permament Food, Dolphin Gallery, Oxford, February 2015
Platform, Proud Gallery, London, July 2014
Publications & reviews
The Carcanet Blog, essay on my paintings and practice, “Near-Life Experience”, Rowland Bagnall, “I was struck by something similar, I think, in Flight or Freeze, which seems to show a landscape caught between the real and the imagined, even the dreamt or (mis)remembered. […] It’s a landscape in the process of becoming something else, every element seeming to warp and morph, en route to something else. I’ve had this thought in front of other paintings, too, by R. B. Kitaj, Joan Mitchell, and J. M. W. Turner.’” March 2024
Near-Life Experience, Rowland Bagnall, painting “Flight or Freeze” used as cover art, Carcanet Publisher, April 2024, Amazon page
Haringey Community Press, interview about “Calamity”, “Local artist documents observations of pandemic in new exhibition”, Quoted: “The drama and destruction that has swept the world since the Covid-19 pandemic has been painful to experience and to observe. Many injustices that already formed the structure of systems across societies were splayed open, and much of the fragility of life within these systems was thrown into the spotlight. We saw the absurdity of personality politics, and the cost of life it caused.” 2021
Content, artwork feature in issue “Hotel”, writing by Nicholas Hayden, “Spens seems to have an infinite ability to synthesise the wider cultural phenomena of the world and her own experiences. We have been delighted to include some of her latest work in issue 6, to serve both as a gentle release from the vice-like grip that 2020 has on us, and as an awakening to ways of absorbing and representing new experiences.”, 2020
The Times in Scotland, “fat white men”, quoted in review of Matiere, 2016
Shut Your Gob, artist interview, 2016
Curated
Healing: the Mind, the Body and the Image Today, The Bloomsbury Gallery, London, 2019
Christian Thompson AO & Sunil Gupta, Magdalen College, Oxford, 2014
Beth Fisher RSA, Oscar Wilde Room, Oxford, 2014
Prizes
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019, for drawing “Wednesday at the Nellie Dean”, shortlisted
The Egerton Coghill Prize for Landscape Art 2016, for video “The Norman Conquest (My Immigration Story)” won
The Oxford University Press Prize 2015, for painting “The Old Empire”, shortlisted