Announcing representation of Saskia Colwell

In her work, Saskia Colwell explores themes of voyeurism, intimacy and representation. Using charcoal, charcoal powder and chalk on natural calfskin vellum, a traditional support that has been used in art for centuries, she creates a close connection between the body and skin as both subject matter and medium, whereby the vellum, with its natural imperfections, is held in dialogue with the human body depicted. Often intimate in scale, her works offer expansive considerations of female representation and contemporary issues of censorship and agency.

Colwell’s works deliberately blur stylistic, visual, and formal lines, as Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou defines in a recent essay: ‘Existing at the interstices of the private and the public, the intimate and the distant, the licit and the illicit, the delicate and the crude, the classical and the contemporary, Colwell’s drawings profess innocence even when they are ripe with knowing. Bordering on sculpted exactitude when completed in the softest of chalks and charcoal powder, her work delivers one thing, only to dare us to unwrap, to see, to touch, another… She unsettles expectations by making us question what we initially see… and then further probes what we want to know
and learn…’

Works in Colwell’s recent exhibition Skin on Skin were commenced during a residency with the gallery in Venice in spring 2024 and address multiple tensions between strength and vulnerability, the ideal and the real, the curves, flow and imperfections of the body against compositional devices of symmetry and abstraction. Writing about the exhibition in Wallpaper, Millie Walton comments: ‘Colwell seems to draw our attention to skin itself – a continuous surface that wraps around and contains the body; a barrier as well as an erogenous zone… The body becomes substance and matter but rather than being objectifying, it is a perspective that allows us to step out of the role of the voyeur and to appreciate the body for its artistic, expressive and sensual possibilities.’

About the artist

Born in 1999 in London, where she currently lives and works, Saskia Colwell graduated from the Masters Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art in 2023. In 2022 she completed a BA (Hons) in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and, in 2018, the Foundation Year at the Royal Drawing School.

The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Skin on Skin, was on view at Victoria Miro Venice, 1 February–15 March 2025. Additionally, her work has been included in several group exhibitions including LEDA and the SWAN: a myth of creation and destruction, curated by Minna Moore Ede and presented by Vortic in collaboration with Victoria Miro, London(2024), VAMPIRE::MOTHER, curated by Jasmine Wahi in collaboration with Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles(2024), Conscious Unconscious at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023), Lapsus Calami, curated by EddiePeake,at Marlborough, London (2023), and Summer Lovin’, curated by Joan Tucker and Henry Relph, at Stems Gallery,Paris (2022). Colwell’s work is in a number of private collections.

Image: Portrait of Saskia Colwell

Photography: Federico Vespignani

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro