Working with acrylic on large canvases, British artist Kim Booker uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Her semi-autobiographical paintings, created intuitively through a combination of gestural abstraction and layers of drawn imagery, often feature figures in poses that are suggestive of differing emotional states. Elements are scrubbed out, obscured and painted over, with dynamic strokes and scrawls of colour reflecting both the physicality of painting and the artist’s emotions and self-censorship. While rooted in modern styles, Booker’s work displays influences of German Expressionism, idiosyncratic British paintings (such as the work of Roy Oxlade) and American abstract expressionism. These influences are all combined with a contemporary perspective on identity and relationships. 

Booker completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2019, and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including South Korea, Paris and Barcelona.

The 18th-century Venetian Rococo painter Rosalba Carriera was one of art history’s most successful artists. She was highly regarded for her delicate yet innovative work in pastel portraiture. Said to be largely self-taught, Carriera began her career painting miniatures, mostly of people and allegorical subjects. Such works quickly established her reputation and gained her acceptance into Rome’s prestigious Accademia di San Luca in 1705, at a time when women were mostly excluded from professional artistic circles.

In 1720, Carriera travelled to Paris, where she created portraits of prominent individuals, including the young Louis XV, and then all across Europe, where she continued to amass admirers, including Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who collected more than one hundred of her pastels.

As the great French connoisseur and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of Carriera, ‘It must be agreed that this demoiselle has discovered the art of treating this type of painting in a way that no one had before her, which makes the most skilful say that this sort of pastel, with all the strength and truth of colours, preserves a certain freshness and lightness of touch where transparent, which is superior to that of oil painting.’

Carriera’s eyesight began to deteriorate when she reached her 70s and, by 1749, she had become permanently blind, rendering her unable to work. She died in 1757 in Venice, enjoying renown as the artist who helped transform the pastel medium into a serious and highly-admired art form.

Carriera’s portraits are in the collections of The National Gallery in London, The National Gallery of Ireland and The Frick Collection in New York, among other major art establishments. 

Italian-British artist Lavinia Harrington received her Master in Fine Arts in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London with a distinction in 2024. Prior to gaining her MFA, she graduated from Oxford University with a degree in art history in 2008 and, two years later, completer her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has 15 years of experience working in arts education, teaching in museums, galleries and schools across the United Kingdom and Italy, and delivering public talks for the National Gallery in London.

Harrington works primarily on handmade paper, to which she applies pastels, raw pigments and water-based materials. Much of her visceral process involves the folding and layering of paper, often applying the pastel or pigment directly with her hands, soaking and rubbing until the tactile sensibilities of surface and structure resonate with the experiences she is exploring. ‘My pieces emerge over many unseen, unresolved layers and erasures, and are folded and unfolded in the process…I believe in, and am sensitive to, the inherent agency of colour and material…Working with paper has become integral to my practice for the intimacy and immediacy it elicits.’ 

Collage and assemblage are also an important part of Harrington’s method.   

This artwork, owned by EKCART ASIA, was completed in 2024 and is the first of three pieces that share the same title, Alone With You. The series is inspired by a line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s early poetry collection, The Book of Hours. 

In 2022, Harrington took part in the group show, I Felt That, a collaborative project addressing the gender pain gap, at the artist-run space, The Tub, in Hackney, London. More recently, Harrington’s works were included in group shows at the Hew Hood Gallery and at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, both also in London. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award and was awarded the Audrey Wykeham Prize for Painting.

Being partially blind has not prevented Bianca Raffaella from becoming an artist. The British painter and graduate of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) is registered blind, although Raffaella can see things from within a metre and for brief moments of time in her left eye. 

Thus, she works from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation, creating evocative and ephemeral paintings that capture fleeting moments and draw audiences into a world where images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light. 

Raffaella also relies on touch in her painting process. Never losing contact with the canvas, she blends delicate hues and dusty colours until they become an ethereal impression — cloudy details made with fingertips, brushstrokes or scrapes of a palette knife. 

In a series featuring a collection of textural flower paintings (two of which are in EKCART ASIA’s collection), Raffaella’s ability to navigate the canvas with these quick, expressive movements is eloquent; her impressions of blooms poignantly exploring themes of memory, perception and fragility, encourage viewers to closely engage with details that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

While deeply personal and complex, Raffaella hopes her works shed light on her experiences as a visually impaired artist, and aims to make her work accessible and relatable to all viewers.