RCA Degree Show 2025 Highlights: Artists with Something New to Say
RCA Degree Show 2025 Highlights: A Bold New Wave of Artistic Voices
The Royal College of Art’s School of Arts & Humanities Degree Show 2025 offers a powerful look at the future of contemporary art. With over 150 graduating artists across disciplines, the show delivers a deeply resonant mix of ideas—from digital disorientation to collective memory, from ancestral ritual to political urgency.
These artists are not just making work—they're making statements. Each piece carries a sense of purpose, often blending the personal with the universal. The result? A show that feels both intimate and expansive, where quiet detail meets bold commentary.
Take Cairo Dwek, whose large-scale painting Spoken Veil plays with perception and time. Drawing on Op Art but grounded in emotional experience, her pixel-like dots collapse and re-form, capturing the unease of our digital reality. Her work is as much about what we feel as what we see.
On the other end of the spectrum, Chiedu Okonta confronts us with raw political weight. His painting Focus Alat! – FUBU weaves together mythology, corruption, and cultural reclamation through multi-layered textures and symbols. A recipient of the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, Okonta stands out for his ability to translate systemic critique into a tactile visual language. It’s not just art—it’s a call to awareness.
For more voices pushing boundaries in visual culture, you can explore Blowout Art, where many young talents like those from RCA are part of a wider creative shift. Artists today aren’t waiting to be discovered—they’re disrupting, reframing, and rewriting what art can be.
This article spotlights the RCA Degree Show 2025 highlights—those artists who not only impressed with technique, but also said something urgent, honest, and new. Scroll on to meet the names shaping the next chapter in contemporary art.
Cairo Dwek: Painting at the Edge of Digital Collapse
Cairo Dwek explores the meeting point of truth and illusion. Her acrylic painting, “Spoken Veil” (244 × 162 cm), hangs large. Dots—like “pixels”—come together and fall apart. They shape waves, tunnels, and speed, hinting at tension between the digital and the real.
Cairo Dwek with her artwork Spoken Veil at RCA Degree show 2025
Her artist statement speaks of “clash of curves and straight lines”, of jeopardy, and of a moment when "the floor gives way beneath our feet." Dwek draws on Op Art influences like Bridget Riley, yet undercurrent emotion sets her work apart.
Spoken Veil details
This painting invites close inspection. Then it asks you to step back and reflect. It's both intimate and grand—and it speaks of time, fear and the digital age.
Cairo Dwek
Spoken Veil
Acrylic on Canvas
244 cm x 162 cm
Isabel Muñoz‑Newsome: Visual and Sonic Storytelling
Isabel Muñoz‑Newsome is a singer-songwriter who now delves into painting. Her oil-on-canvas piece, “The Other Place”, presents two entwined bodies. Dark shades merge and then re-emerge—like shapes rising from the earth. The result is hypnotic. It grips your attention and doesn’t let go.
Supported by the Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship in partnership with Chelsea Arts Club, her work holds the weight of music and the intensity of visual art. Isabel shows us that sound and paint can speak in tandem.
Isabel Muñoz‑Newsome “The other place” oil on canvas and board
Ruby Read: All the Wicked Are Here
British painter Ruby Read makes a grand statement with her installation “All the Wicked Are Here”—a collection of 150 miniature oil portraits, each representing a fellow RCA Painting student. It’s ambitious, intimate, and epic in scope.
Painted in her signature impasto style, Ruby’s portraits feel sculpted as much as painted. She applies thick, tactile layers of oil, building each figure with bold strokes and emotional force. Her work touches on identity, perception, and the tension between self-image and societal expectations.
Influenced by Frank Auerbach and Emilio Villalba, Ruby’s paintings have both weight and vulnerability. That she managed to portray an entire cohort of peers—and that every single portrait sold individually—is a testament to her unique voice and impact.
Ruby Read “All the Wicked Are Here”, featuring 150 RCA Painting 2025 students
Tom Halsall: Sympathy for Neutrinos
Tom Halsall, a painter from the North West of England, interrogates the human form with painterly precision. His work, “Sympathy for Neutrinos” (oil on canvas, 90 × 110 cm), imagines bodies merging, folding, and dissolving. It’s not just about anatomy—it’s about existence.
Are we limited to flesh and bone? Or does the human extend beyond?
Tom’s paintings explore this boundary. Forms contort, mutate, and stretch into the surreal. At times, the canvas seems to wrestle with itself. It's philosophical—but also deeply physical.
Tom Halsall “Sympathy for Neutrinos” Oil on canvas 90 x 110 cm
Mohini Kaur: Ritual, Paint, and Ancestry
Mohini Kaur invites viewers into a space of liminality and openness. Her monumental canvas, “My Long Ancestral Body” (183 × 1000 cm), is more than a painting—it is an offering.
Mohini Kaur “My long ancestral body”
Water based paints, Kumkum ink, Ash & Charcoal on canvas: With Offerings
183 x 1000 cm
2025
Using water-based pigments, kumkum ink, ash, and charcoal, Kaur explores themes of transience, inheritance, and interbeing. Her process is deeply intuitive. She works with elements like water and fire—not just as materials, but as collaborators.
Kaur’s work is grounded in her polymorphic cultural heritage. It draws from ancestral knowledge, memory, and gesture. She avoids fixed meanings. Instead, she offers a sensorial experience, where the viewer becomes part of the work.
“My long ancestral body” details of offerings
Her soft, flowing lines form a liquid language of their own. The painting reads like a visual mantra, one that celebrates renewal and transformation.
“My long ancestral body” RCA 2025 Mohini Kaur
Dina Leonova: Memory in Watercolour
Dina Leonova, originally from Belarus and now based in Warsaw, presents an ongoing series titled “Russian Doll”. These ghostly watercolours (90 × 120 cm each) explore the fragility of memory and the weight of the past.
Her technique is unorthodox. Leonova sometimes washes her paintings in machines or tears them by hand. This radical approach reflects the impermanence of lived experience. Faces appear and vanish. Bodies blur. The images feel like emotional residues, not finished portraits.
“Russian Doll”n detail Dina Leonova
Trained as an architect, Leonova brings a structural rhythm to her work. Each canvas has precision—but also vulnerability. Her muted palette and gestural brushwork create a quiet, melancholic tone.
Supported by a Chevening Scholarship, Leonova uses art as a form of personal and political expression. Her paintings feel like memories you almost forgot, softly floating back to the surface.
Dina Leonova Russian Doll (ongoing series), 2025
Watercolour on canvas
90 x 120 cm each
Supported by the Chevening Scholarship
Usaydh Agha: The Archetypes of Belonging
British-Pakistani artist Usaydh Agha explores identity, nostalgia, and collective memory through symbolic oil paintings. His piece, “A Revolution in Military Affairs” (60 × 90 cm), offers a surreal reflection on personal experience and historical imagery.
“A Revolution in military affairs” oil on canvas 60 x 90 cm Usaydh Agha
Agha’s work fuses the personal with the mythic. He paints not from observation, but from internal landscapes—imagined memories and spiritual metaphors. These images are private yet strangely universal. He calls this balance the “personified impersonal.”
Each painting exists between dream and document. His colours are warm and human, while his forms resist clear definition. Agha’s work invites deep reflection on what it means to belong—to a culture, or even to oneself.
Supported by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s UK Scholarship, Agha’s voice adds important depth to this year’s RCA Painting cohort.
📸 @usaydh
Katie Kaur: Underwater States of Mind
Katie Kaur paints from a space between silence and sensation. In her 2025 work, “Markings on Your Surface” (130 × 150 cm), ghost-like figures drift through dreamlike landscapes.
Using seaweed ink, oil, and miracle medium on hand-stitched canvas, she explores the feeling of being underwater—weightless, suspended, and slightly lost. Her layers are delicate. Her palette is muted. Time seems to slow across each surface.
Hand-stitched fabric fragments puncture the canvas. These ruptures feel like small traumas—moments of memory, grief, or quiet reflection. Kaur is drawn to emotional states that are hard to define: solitude, loss, and the murmur of anxiety.
Through her minimalist approach, Kaur creates work that is deeply felt but lightly held—inviting us to float, drift, and feel without needing answers.
“Markings on your surface” details 2025, seaweed ink, oil and miracle medium on hand-stitched canvas, 130 x 150cm Katie Kaur
Tiyana Mitchell: Archives of Fragmented Memory
Tiyana Mitchell, an American-Jordanian artist raised in Cyprus, creates oil paintings rooted in personal and political archives. Her standout piece, “Album 1: Amman: 1940’s: 1” (260 × 160 cm), transforms a quiet family photo into a monumental reflection.
Tiyana Mitchell “Album 1: Amman: 1940’s: 1” (260 × 160 cm)
Mitchell draws from her grandfather’s Middle Eastern photo archive. Her process crops and isolates fragments—turning overlooked corners into powerful focal points. She often blends these historical images with her own contemporary film photography.
This tension between past and present creates unease. Her paintings feel private, like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t. But that’s the point—Mitchell invites us to question how memory is constructed and whose stories get told.
Detail of “Album 1: Amman: 1940’s: 1” by Tiyana Mitchell
Harriet Horner: Monsters in the Margins
Harriet Horner paints monsters—but not in the way you'd expect. In “Encore” (120 × 90 cm diptych), she blends surreal fantasy with psychological inquiry.
Her creatures emerge from myth, cartoons, and childhood dreams. They're tricksters, half-formed, slipping between identities. These aren’t just odd figures—they’re symbols of the subconscious, raw and unresolved.
Horner’s work plays with contrast: humour and horror, clarity and confusion. She uses painting to explore what lurks beneath the surface, drawing viewers into spaces that feel both strange and familiar.
Harriet Horner “Encore” (120 × 90 cm)
Constance Christina Nie: Where Psychology Meets Paint
Constance Nie, a Chinese-Canadian artist trained in both psychology and fine art, merges these fields in her emotionally rich practice. In “The Mirage” (60 × 90 cm), she translates intimate relationships into colour, form, and space.
Her paintings explore conflict, desire, and emotional ambiguity. Using psychological theory as a foundation, she paints what words often fail to express.
Each canvas becomes a soft mirror—revealing layers of human connection. Nie invites the viewer to look inward, using painting as a shared language of understanding.
“The Mirage” (60 × 90 cm) by Constance Christina Nie
Santara Kaur Pawar: Painting the Nervous System
Santara Pawar creates large-scale works that bypass logic and speak directly to the body. In “Linger” (130 × 100 cm), she captures inner states—feelings that vibrate just beneath the skin.
Her process is intuitive. She enters a dreamlike state and paints from sensation rather than sight. The result is abstract, sensory-rich work that bypasses narrative and activates emotional memory.
Her Surrealist leanings are clear, yet her textures feel fresh and immediate. Pawar’s work invites you not just to look, but to feel.
Santara Kaur Pawar ‘Linger’ details
Oil on canvas
130 x 100 cm
Chiedu Okonta: Urgency in Layers
Chiedu Okonta’s work pulses with political energy. His 2025 piece, “Focus Alat! – FUBU” (94 × 125 cm), confronts corruption, resource exploitation, and collective trauma.
Chiedu Okonta “Focus Alat! – FUBU” (94 × 125 cm) 2025
Layered with acrylic, oil, gel, and ink, Okonta’s textured canvas reads like a visual protest. His references span mythology, memory, and philosophy. Yet, it’s never didactic. His work doesn’t accuse—it asks.
Chiedu Okonta “Focus Alat! – FUBU” (94 × 125 cm) 2025 details
“What are we doing?” the painting seems to whisper. By blending archival logic with expressive force, Okonta places viewers within systems of power, urging reflection—and action.
Close look at Chiedu Okonta “Focus Alat! – FUBU” (94 × 125 cm) 2025
Ali Bartlett: Digital Isolation on Canvas
Ali Bartlett paints the eerie beauty of modern loneliness. In “Illuminated Silence” (60 × 80 cm, oil on shower curtain), she transforms everyday solitude into immersive narrative.
Her medium is unconventional. Painting on a shower curtain reflects themes of privacy, vulnerability, and domestic isolation. Inspired by theatre and film, her works sit at the edge of reality—soft, strange, and emotionally charged.
Bartlett’s figures seem paused, mid-thought. Through colour and composition, she captures the feeling of digital life—quiet, intimate, and a little haunted.
Ali Bartlett “Illuminated Silence” (60 × 80 cm, oil on shower curtain)
Final Reflections: RCA Degree Show 2025 Highlights a Generation Ready to Speak
The RCA School of Arts & Humanities Show 2025 is more than just an exhibition. It is a portrait of a generation. These artists don’t simply display work—they provoke thought, question norms, and explore what it means to live now.
Across mediums—oil, watercolour, mixed media—themes emerge: memory, digital overload, identity, time, ancestry, and the body. These artists invite viewers not just to observe, but to feel. Whether it’s Ruby Read’s collective portraiture, Cairo Dwek’s collapsing pixels, or Mohini Kaur’s spiritual canvas scroll, each artist offers something bold, raw, and new.
This year’s show proves the RCA continues to foster fearless expression. These artists are not afraid to confront the personal, the political, or the poetic. They’re shaping the future of contemporary art—one risk, one stroke, and one story at a time.
For those following emerging talent in UK art schools, this show is essential viewing. And for collectors, curators, and art lovers alike, these are names to remember.
🖼️ Discover more about the RCA Degree Show 2025 highlights by following the artists.
Also check out our picks from the Slade Art School graduation show: Emerging Talent: Slade Art School Graduates
