Young Masters Retrospective: Looking Back, Moving Forward
2009 - 2024, curated by director & founder Cynthia Valianti Corbett
Featuring artists:
Lluís Barba, shortlisted, 2009
Fabiano Parisi, shortlisted 2012
Matt Smith, winner of the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize, 2014
Elise Ansel, Highly Commended for the Young Masters Art Award, 2014
Isabelle Van Zeijl, highly commended for the Emerging Woman Artist Award, 2017
Giggs Kgole, winner of the People’s Choice award 2019
Ramon Omolaja Adeyemi, shortlisted 2023
Young Masters is a not-for-profit initiative founded by UK-based American Gallerist Cynthia Valianti Corbett in 2009 to support and nurture artists who look back to the art of the past. This presentation at the LA Art Show showcases artists from each of the six editions of the Young Masters Art Prize.
Lluis Barba is a Spanish artist making large-scale works inspired by history painting from Picture Gallery of Views of Modern Rome by Pannini, to Picasso’s Guernica, Barba challenges the past with his social and political commentary. Similarly, Matt Smith contests the histories presented in the museum, subverting and questioning through queer interventions of ceramics and textile works.
Meanwhile, Italian artist Fabiano Parisi’s sumptuous photographs illuminate the sublime to be found in architectural decay, while Dutch artist Isabelle van Zeijl’s self portraits contest traditional ideals of beauty and the feminine aesthetic. American painter Elise Ansel reinterprets the artworks from Old Masters such as Titian and Goya and creates colourful masterpieces that mimic the Abstract Expressionists.
Ramon Omolaja Adeyemi, from the Nigerian diaspora uses highly detailed, expressive painting to show scenes from everyday life across the African and European continents. South African artist Giggs Kgole, the youngest artist to be shortlisted for Young Masters, uses his work and nomadic wanderings to pay tribute to his African ancestors.