Painting (MA)
The 2025 graduates of the MA Painting programme at the Royal College of Art collectively demonstrate the insistent vitality of painting today.
Works in the exhibition engage with a breadth of materials and media, processes and techniques, concepts and thematics. Painting here is an expansive and energetic field. Our graduates take risks, experiment and test their relationships to the conventions and global histories of painting, whilst inventing new visual languages and material possibilities across image, object, performance and installation. Their work testifies to the elasticity of painting as both material practice and a way of thinking.
We see here works that explore the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman worlds, that engage with archaic, vernacular, ancestral and indigenous traditions, and that interrogate colonial violence and postcolonial negotiations. We find practice that considers unseen aspects of conflict and social injustice, and bears witness to experiences of migration and diasporic identities. Alongside palimpsests of memory and constructions of self, we discover symbolic and fictional worlds, intervention in the digital space and painting as play, subversion and humour. Through their work, students question the limits of what painting is.
With over 40 different nationalities in this year’s cohort, painting as transnational and intercultural practice is here a live reality, a prism for dialogue across borders and enabling new communities of practice. Whether exposing the unseen, amplifying the overlooked, or intensifying sensations, painting makes visible the interstices of our given world. This year’s graduates remind us of all the many ways in which painting invites us to look again.
