Lot 12 - Bianca Maria Raffaella - Courcheval Early Morning

Acrylic on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Mercedes Lucy

About
Bianca Raffaella (b 1992, London)

Working from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation, Bianca Raffaella is a British artist and activist currently based in Margate. As a partially sighted artist, her ephemeral floral and figurative paintings draw viewers into her world by capturing fleeting moments suspended in persistent vision, where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light. Raffaella's ongoing series of textural flower paintings evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how she first learned to read and write.

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

Graduating with a First-Class Honours degree in 2016, Bianca Raffaella was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University with a degree in the Visual Arts. Since completing her 2023/4 residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR), Raffaella now works from TKE Studios, where she uses gestural fragments and impasto techniques to capture motion and visual shifts on the canvas. In 2021, Raffaella’s work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, coordinated by Yinka Shonibare, followed by her solo exhibition, Hushed Impressions, at Orleans House Gallery in 2023. She was also awarded the NatWest Entrepreneurship Funding Prize in 2019 for her bespoke sensory fashion label.

An advocate for accessibility in the arts, Raffaella has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institut’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panellist at Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art talk. Most recently, she was selected by Dame Tracey Emin for Flowers Gallery’s 2024 Artist of the Day series, presenting a one-day solo exhibition as part of the programme’s 25th edition.

Education
2013–16 BA, Kingston University London
[The first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University with a First-class degree in the visual arts.]

Solo Exhibitions
2025
Faint Memories, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, UK

2024
Artist of the Day, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, UK

2023
Hushed Impressions, Orleans House Gallery, London, UK

Group Exhibitions
2024
TEARS: The Final Show, TKE Studios, Margate, UK
Small is Beautiful: 42nd Edition, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, UK
Artist of the Day: Group Show, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, UK

2023
TEARS, TKE Studios, Margate, UK

2022
Layers of Vision, Bush House, London, UK

2021
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
Breaking Ground, Orleans House Gallery, London, UK

Awards
2024
Artist of the Day, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, UK
Three To Watch, Hotly tipped female talent of the British art scene, Harper's Bazaar Magazine UK

2023
Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) 2023–24, TKE Studios, Margate, UK

2022
Artist-in-residence 2022–23, Orleans House Gallery, London, UK
Commissioned by King's College London in collaboration with Shape Arts and AccessArt

Gallery Representation
Flowers Gallery (London • New York • Hong Kong)

Public Collections
Tracey Emin Foundation (Margate, UK)

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork
Four impressions from recent memories of Courchevel, in the Tarentaise Valley, France.