Mall Galleries Artists Win BP Portrait Awards

Mall Galleries
Jun 19, 2018 1:12PM

Mall Galleries artists have numbered among the winners of the BP Portrait Award on many occasions, including last year’s winnerBenjamin Sullivan RP NEAC, the 2010 winnerDaphne Todd OBE PPRP NEAC, and the 1996 winnerJames Hague RP. This year, we congratulate regular Mall Galleries exhibitor and Buy Art artist,Miriam Escofet, overall winner of the BP Portrait Award 2018.

Miriam Escofet
Vanitas - Self Portrait
Mall Galleries

Miriam’s portrait of her mother An Angel at my Table wowed the judges with its surreal and sensitive representation of the universal mother figure. In Miriam’s characteristically luminescent style, the artist presents a table laid with fine china at which her mother sits taking tea, looking to her left at something unseen. Not only has the artist been praised for the great skill demonstrated by this work, Miriam has also received touching feedback from viewers for whom An Angel at my Table has helped them reconnect with their own mother, often after the mother has passed away.

Miriam Escofet
Anthony, 2012
Mall Galleries

There is something in the fineness and frailty of the china, itself made of bone, that evokes both the necessary ephemeral and the human desire to preserve the things we love. Miriam has captured a moment of connection and nostalgia with her own mother, yet the sitter’s gaze has moved on, hinting that this connection might one day break. It is an incredibly powerful painting, depicting the sense of dependence, admiration and fear of loss that is felt by all children.

Ania Hobson
Self Portrait
Mall Galleries

We are furthermore delighted to share that Ania Hobson has won the BP Portrait Young Artist Award 2018 for her work, A Portrait of Two Female Painters. Ania is also a regular Mall Galleries exhibitor, with work on Buy Art | Buy Now. A Portrait of Two Female Artists presents the artist alongside her sister-in-law, Stevie Dix, with whom Ania shares a studio. Although Stevie is an abstract artist and Ania a portrait painter, the two women take a great deal of inspiration from each other. The double portrait is angled upwards - a classic shot used in filmmaking to indicate a character’s powerfulness. It makes a feminist statement about the historic under-representation of women artists, and Ania and her peers’ commitment to remedying this imbalance.

Both winning works are powerful statements as well as stunning works of art, achieving a level of accomplishment and complexity that Mall Galleries has come to expect through its intimate dealings with the artists, Miriam Escofet and Ania Hobson. We heartily congratulate them both.

Ania Hobson
Thom, 2015
Mall Galleries

Mall Galleries Buy Art | Buy Now is also proud to host a selection of their work, including Miriam’s Vanitas – Self Portrait, the charcoal sketch Anthony, and several of the artist’s fantasy landscapes: The Portals (triptych), The Temple, and Olive Tree III. The luminescence of An Angel at my Table is shared in Vanitas – Self Portrait, where layer upon layer of mixed media and pastel combine to create the sense of light emanating from within. Miriam’s interest in symbolic objects is also seen through the inclusion of the skull, the nest and the egg, representing birth, death, and the circle of life.

Ania’s Girl in the Hat is also a self-portrait, and one which demonstrates the artist’s characteristic appreciation of fabric and texture. Similarly, Thom is Ania’s 2016 submission to the BP Portrait Award and is a life-size portrait of the artist’s brother in an eye-catching blue chequered suit. The sitter lounges in a tactile leather armchair.

Miriam Escofet
The Temple, 2007
Mall Galleries

Explore stunning work by these award-winning artists online at Mall Galleries Buy Art | Buy Now, and on Artsy, and check out their winning works at the National Portrait Gallery (14 June – 23rd September), before they leave for a tour of the UK.

Mall Galleries