Degree Show 2025: Emerging Talent from City & Guilds Art School Graduates
The City & Guilds of London Art School BA Show 2025 reveals some exciting emerging talent soon to be in the London art scene. This year’s graduation show captures a range of styles. Below, we spotlight three art school graduates whose work stood out for its innovation, emotional honesty, and technical flair.
This year’s degree show at City & Guilds of London Art School reveals bold and thoughtful new voices. Across painting, installation, and figurative work, the emerging talent on display is exceptional.
From unsettling domestic scenes to layered digital realism, these three art school graduates offer a fresh lens on contemporary life. Here’s our roundup of the standouts from the 2025 graduating cohort.
1. Louis Petit: Dreamlike Narratives in Mixed Media
Louis Petit’s paintings blur the line between memory and myth. His large-scale works use a soft, painterly language layered with surreal figures and animals. In one standout piece, a yellow inflatable boat drifts through a foggy forest scene. We see human figures, swans, ghosts, and pixelated flowers, shadows.
The background is streaked with vertical marks, giving the canvas a wet, dreamlike texture. A red grid glows faintly in the top left corner, hinting at something half-remembered or unfinished.
Petit's world feels both childlike and haunted. He seems to play with symbolism— swans, floating lilies, figures watching from afar—to almost create visual poems that are open to interpretation. This layered emotional world marks him out as a compelling new voice among this year’s City & Guilds art school graduates.
2. Phoebe Leech: Fragmented Figures and Digital Blur
Phoebe Leech paints the human figure—but not as we usually see it. Her canvases use digital blur, blocky distortions, and subtle gradients to create a new language of portraiture. Think glitch art meets classical oil painting.
Faces are smeared with digital rectangles and blue overlays. Tiny strips of handwritten text float in the sky, The scenes feel intimate, but the interference distances us—like we’re viewing a memory corrupted by technology.
Her work feels deeply current, reflecting the way digital life reshapes how we see each other. Leech’s confident visual language places her firmly among the emerging talent to watch.
3. Nicole Morrigan: Domestic Horror with a Smile
Nicole Morrigan’s paintings steal the show. Seeming to draw on 1950s Americana, she presents the housewife as almost monstrous but also tragic. Her work is painterly, cinematic, and psychologically charged.
In one large canvas, a heavily pregnant woman stands in a bright kitchen. She has no eyes or nose—just a wide, smiling mouth. Nine faceless children surround her. The woman holds a knife in one hand, like a suburban goddess on the brink. It’s both unsettling and difficult to look away.
In this one, a woman scrubs the floor beside a glowing fireplace. Inside the hearth: not logs, but books and fire. Her husband stands in the foreground, headless, hands shoved in his trouser pockets. The mood is eerie and hyper-real, like a film still from a lost David Lynch movie.
Her works feel like they deal with the edge of control. Women doing what they’re told, what they’re ‘meant to’ but something’s cracking underneath.
Using thick paint and bright, old-fashioned primary colours, Morrigan pushes back against the myth of the perfect home. Her work is powerful, timely, and unforgettable—a highlight of this year’s degree show.
Why These Graduates Matter
Art school shows can be uneven. But at the City & Guilds of London Art School, the 2025 class feels sharp, critical, and diverse. These three artists—Louis Petit, Phoebe Leech, and Nicole Morrigan—are pushing the medium forward.
They ask urgent questions:
How do we remember our lives in the digital age?
What does safety look like when home becomes claustrophobic?
Can beauty be found in the blurry and broken?
This is exactly what we look for in emerging talent: technical skill, a strong voice, and something to say.
About the City & Guilds Art School
Founded in 1854, the City & Guilds of London Art School has a long history of training painters, sculptors, conservators, and makers. It remains one of the UK’s most respected independent art institutions.
Its degree show each summer is a chance to glimpse the future of British art. This year’s exhibition proves that the school continues to support exciting and ambitious voices.
Final Thoughts
The 2025 degree show at City & Guilds is a must-see for collectors, curators, and anyone curious about where contemporary art is going. The art school graduates featured here—Petit, Leech, and Morrigan—offer original, fearless perspectives. Each one challenges how we see the world.
This is what the best emerging talent does. And it’s thrilling to see it taking shape right now.
