Lot 100 - Noemi Conan - Between Stops

Acrylic medium, pigment, gel pen, and oil marker on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Marta Marsicka

About
Noemi Conan, born in Warsaw, Poland in 1987. Painter. Lives and works in London.

Exploring the narrative potential of visual art through surreal, confrontational and/or humorous images of female friends, family and feline companions in forest landscapes of firs and ferns. Weaving slavic folklore with themes from communist and capitalist propaganda into stories based on personal experience of a young woman in off centre 90’s Eastern Europe.

Having gone through a miraculous journey through space and time, after working miriads of menial migrant jobs, Noemi Conan has finally decided that she’s grown up to be a painter. Despite the warnings of her grandmother, despite the deluge of her mother’s tears. She was not a good cleaner, not an attentive housekeeper. The famous Polish work ethic has not been ignited by any of the jobs that her friends in London worked their way up through. A passion for storytelling and the need for visual aids to explain a curriculum vitae that either confused or outraged her collegues has finally resulted in a glowing path to the Parnassus of a ‘career’. Using plastic colours on canvas, on paper, on glass, on wood, the point of all these ridiculous adventures of the past has been found.

Taking on the name of one of her REAL dads, the ones who actually taught her life in a small town in Western Poland all those years ago where even all the cats were female cats, Conan decided to take no prisoners. Following her other dad, the sad Norwegian man with a moustache, she gone over-the-top about her emotional landscapes. The last dad taught her that it’s sometimes worth looking way back to go forward and applaud that progression on the faces of your opponents. Thank goodness for Arnold and Edvard and Igor.

Conan’s work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. Her work is in the collections of Soho House London, Glasgow School of Art and the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin. She has been selected as one of Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2021, has been featured in the John Moores Painting Prize in 2020, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2021 and the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition. She graduated with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art followed by the Royal Drawing School Drawing Year (2021-2022). Currently at the Turps Studio Programme (2022-2024) and The Fores Project February-March 2023 residency. From september 2024 she will start an MFA in Painting at the Slade in London.

Represented by Christine Park Gallery in Shanghai and Traits Libres Gallery in Paris.