Five Artists To Catch At 'New Artist Fair: Summer Exhibition'

New Artist Fair is returning to Old Truman Brewery between 13-15 September. It’s a chance to survey emerging artists from both the UK and further afield. As an added bonus, it's completely free to visit. I’ve picked five artists to look out for at New Artist Fair: Summer Exhibition.

This is a sponsored blog post on behalf of New Artist Fair

Rob Clayton

Tower Bridge is one of London’s most iconic buildings and is probably photographed hundreds of times a day - just the hashtag itself brings back over two million results in Instagram. So to find a unique way of presenting it without the usual groans of ‘not that bridge again’ is quite the challenge.

Rob Clayton rises to the challenge by capturing its reflection in the medium of colourful bubbles. A style that takes me back to childhood summer days in the garden of chasing down the bubbles that were generated from washing up liquid by my parents or my older brother. It rekindles a sense of wonderment that can be lost when constantly surrounded by London’s majestic architecture.

Van Krusteva

Winged rats, vermin, destroyers of statues with their droppings. The feral pigeon may be found in almost every city centre and it doesn’t have a great reputation. With missing feet and known to carry diseases if there was an award for least glamorous bird then they would probably win.

Not so for painter Van Krusteva who flips their negative PR on its head and gives them the centre of attention in this painting. Forcing us to stop and admire these birds’ ability to survive all across the world on any scraps of food that we leave in our wake.

Cat Randall

There’s something very disturbing about this image that makes me shudder. The thought of insects crawling on bare skin is unsettling enough but the idea of them on the lips, so close to being ingested, makes my stomach turn. Reminding me of that time when I almost swallowed a fly and had to rinse my mouth out over a dozen times to get rid of the ‘taste of fly’.

Ladybirds are beautiful, as are the lips in the painting, so it’s playful to fuse two beautiful things in an artwork that makes the skin, and lips, crawl so effectively.

Dr. Martin Raskovsky

Where is she going? How did she end up here? Who is she? There are so many questions we want to ask this person cycling through a seemingly arid landscape. Dr Martin Raskovsky creates fantastical landscapes that are rooted in the real world but alien enough that they seem like they could be on another planet.

When I look at his works they have a surreal feel as if they could be from a science fiction movie or from a dream I’ve had the night before. They also evoke the serenity that we get from looking at an Impressionist painting, in that they are beautiful works that can be admired for their aesthetic quality as well.

Neil Wilson

Are the colours spiralling out towards you or are they drawing you in? Does it remind you of a psychedelic trip? The beauty of abstract art is the viewer can take it in any direction they choose, imprinting their own experiences and emotions upon a work. For me it reminds me of the shimmering colours in petrol.

This work is actually based on gamma brainwaves and Neil Wilson’s work is often inspired by items that we can’t visualise with human eyes, including other types of brainwaves and antimatter. Energy becomes matter in these eye catching works that are reminiscent of optical illusions triggering a sense of movement from static artworks.