Lot 307 - Lucy Pass - Camera One

Oil, acrylic, and pencil on paper
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Art on a Postcard

About

Lucy Pass is a self-taught contemporary portrait painter living and working in Cheltenham, UK. Her work is focused on unpicking the idea of traditional portraiture, where the intent of her portraits isn’t to capture a subject in their truest form, but instead to explore the unseen things that lie within us all. Fragments of faces hang in space, vanishing, obscured, repeated; all underscored with a language of gestural, abstract marks and shocks of colour, like key sentences highlighted from a passage. So much is stripped back that the redacted elements take on power and it becomes as much about what you can’t see as what you can. The result is a visual conversation of absence and addition, inviting the viewer to ask questions and fill in the blanks.

Solo Exhibitions

2025

TBC, Guildford House Gallery, Guildford, UK

Group Exhibitions

2024

The Guildford House Open, Guildford House Gallery, Guildford

RBSA Prize Exhibition, RBSA Gallery, Birmingham

RBSA Summer Show, RBSA Gallery, Birmingham

The British Art Prize '23 Exhibition, Gallery@OXO, London

2023

The Royal West of England Academy 170th Annual Open Exhibition, Bristol

Drawing (Paper) Show, The Bridewell Studios and Gallery, Liverpool

2022

The Royal West of England Academy 169th Annual Open Exhibition, Bristol

The Contemporary British Portrait Painters Exhibition, The Department Store, Brixton, London

2021

Pressing Matters - Helium London, 5 Carlos Place, London

2020

Perceptions, Contemporary British Portrait Painters, Cass Art Space, Islington, London

2019

The John Ruskin Prize: Agent Of Change The Holden Gallery, Manchester

Awards

2024

First prize, The Guildford House Open

2023

First prize, The British Art Prize

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork

I love experimenting to see the intensity of mood I can create from out-of-context facial fragments, shapes and marks - these elements are building blocks that repeat throughout my work. I saw the tiny scale of the postcard format as a challenge to communicate as much meaning and emotion as possible from extremely minimal compositions. 'Camera One' and 'Camera Two' are quite similar in terms of the sum of their parts, but they express different things.