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Press Release
CONTEMPORARY ACADEMICIANS
Kiera Bennett, Matthew Collings, Richard Dyer, Zavier Ellis, Mathew Gibson, Laxmi Hussain, Sam Jackson, Liane Lang RA, Lydia Pettit, Narbi Price, Joanna Whittle
EXHIBITION DATES Friday 17 April–Friday 15 May 2026
EXHIBITION HOURS Monday–Friday 10am–5pm
ADDRESS Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT
CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is pleased to present CONTEMPORARY ACADEMICIANS, an exhibition of work by the co-founders and faculty of Contemporary Art Academy—the pioneering online art education initiative founded by Zavier Ellis and Mathew Gibson in 2022.
Presented at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON’s viewing room at Gramercy Park Studios in Soho, the exhibition brings together eleven artists working across painting, collage, etching and mixed media, who have exhibited at institutions including MoMA, the V&A, Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Academy, and whose work is represented in major public and private collections worldwide. What unites them is not a single aesthetic but an exceptional level of engagement with the possibilities of art—and a shared commitment to passing that on.
Liane Lang RA investigates monuments, memory and iconoclasm through photography and sculpture, with work held in the V&A, MoMA, and Saatchi collections. Narbi Price, winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2017 and included in Phaidon’s Vitamin P3, makes forensically observed paintings of sites charged with collective history.
Matthew Collings — BAFTA Award-winning broadcaster, art critic and artist — presents a work from his controversial series of drawings that weave art history, politics and biography into a singular and restless visual language. Richard Dyer, Editor in Chief of Third Text and Contributing Editor to Ambit, whose critical writing has appeared in Frieze, The Guardian and Art Review, shows a finely rendered, near-photorealist painting in which mechanical and organic forms uneasily coexist.
Sam Jackson, whose work is held in the collections of Kay Saatchi, David Roberts and Norman Rosenthal, brings his distinctive collision of classical portraiture with graffiti-inflected text and mark-making. Lydia Pettit, whose solo exhibitions at White Cube and Galerie Judin have established her as one of the most compelling voices working with the body today, explores trauma and self-identity through a horror-inflected visual language.
Laxmi Hussain, whose commissions include the Henry Moore Foundation, the Tate and the Royal Academy of Arts, offers figurative explorations of the female form, identity and motherhood rendered in her signature ultramarine blue. Joanna Whittle, winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2019 and the New Light Prize 2020, presents intimate landscape paintings that explore ritual, mourning and the fragile residue of human presence. Kiera Bennett — whose work is held in the collections of Julian Opie and Cornelia Parker — conveys a nuanced, historically informed painting practice.
Zavier Ellis’s layering of abstraction, text and collage engages directly with histories of resistance and political conflict. His work is held in the collections of Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel and Beth Rudin DeWoody, and has been exhibited at Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Pera Museum Istanbul and Torrance Art Museum Los Angeles. Mathew Gibson, former Professor of Foundation Studies at SCAD, Savannah and director of the Winsor & Newton residency programme at Colart, presents an unpeopled interior in egg tempera infused with alienated intimacy.
Contemporary Art Academy was founded to address the affordability crisis in art education—offering live online courses and mentorship programmes delivered by leading professionals at genuinely accessible prices. CONTEMPORARY ACADEMICIANS is a public expression of that ethos: an opportunity to encounter the work of the practitioners at the heart of the academy and its thriving international community of artists.
For artwork list email: direct@charliesmithlondon.com
For further information: contemporaryartacademy.com | charliesmithlondon.com