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Rosanna Dean is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in London. She is artist associate at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies where she is developing and sharing ideas around Shaktism with Professors and Researchers from Oxford University and academics from around the world which the Hindu Centre bring together. Since 2021 she has been a tutor and lecturer at The Essential School of Painting in North London.
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She graduated from the Royal College of Art (2019), BA (Hons) Painting Camberwell College of Art (2013) and studied Old Master painting at the Angel Academy Florence. She has spoken on spiritual practice in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and following a year residency at the Florence Trust received EU funding to develop her work exploring and converging different ways of representing the divine.
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She recently returned from India, researching ritual practices such as Tantra and Theyyam and on her return began learning Sanskrit with a particular focus on sound and the body. She has been practicing yoga for 12 years and is also a qualified Ashtanga Yoga teacher recently completing a cod course in therapeutic touch and alignment.
Her artwork addresses conflicting ideologies surrounding representations of the divine; seeking to establish connections between the ways in which societies have depicted religious belief over time, she combines features of divergent practices to create work with a contemporary spiritualism.
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Dean is fascinated with the grotesque, and beauty and repulsion intermingle in her canvases. The figures become decontextualized, ambiguous, anonymous forms that hover in space. The body stripped of its individual identity becomes a vehicle for exploring shared fears and experiences. The common site where different perspectives, viewpoints and histories collide. Dean creates an open discourse in deciphering the objects on her canvas and installations, to probe our contemporary beliefs, and question what the body means to her viewer.
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Having taken religious painting of the past as her starting point, Dean has spent time deeply researching how its transformative effects are achieved. Her research has led her to employ centuries old techniques of layers and glazing to achieve the desired luminosity and lifelikeness with her oils. Her most recent works re tell stories through installations and performance that ask her viewer to consider their relationship to materials and dependency on rapidly disappearing eco-systems.
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She worked with Rashad Salim developing the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021) and Gregory Ryan alongside environmental organisations (2009-12) and with artist and activist.
WRITING:
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The Poetic Grotesque | The Grotesque as a vehicle for progress | On Painting
Hannah Hoch | Whitechapel Gallery Review | Avenir Issue 2
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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
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2024 Resistance, Limbo Gallery, Margate
2024. Kink, Maximillian Wolfgang Gallery, London
2024. Sadness is But a Wall Between Two Gardens, Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London
2023 Bootstrap Charity Group Show, Print House Gallery, London
2022 Group Show, The Maffioli Art Group, Scalpel Building, London
2021 Economy of Errors, Ohsh Projects, 106 New Oxford Street
2020 FBA Futures, Mall Galleries, London
2019 Kupala Festival Lunar Edition, Phytology, London
2019 Hoovering: Enter the Vacuum, Red Lion's Boys Club, London
2019 Critical Matter, The Dyson Gallery, London
2018 East Wing Biennial 13, Surge, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
2018 Thumbnails, Hockney Gallery, London
2017 Unshowable/Unthrowable, Hockney Gallery, London
2017 SPACE LCN Showcase 2nd Edition, SPACE, London
2016 Paper Cuts, Transition Gallery, London
2016 Drive Thru, Cavendish Square Q Park, London
2016 Summer Exhibition, Lubomirov / Angus-Hughes, London
2016 Summer Exhibition, Florence Trust, London
2016 Winter OpenFlorence Trust, London
2015 Yantra: Beyond Our Bodies, Lane Crawford, Hong Kong
2015 Command of NatureLes Nuits Anthologie, Paris
2014 Winter Salon, Kids of Dada, Pembridge Place, London
2014 Curious Duke Secret Art Prize, Curious Duke Gallery, London
2014 Turn on, Tune in, Drop out, La Bellvilliose, Paris
2014 Society Beyond Borders, TedX Oval Space, London
2013 Someshta's Garden, Vibe Place Gallery, London
2013 BFI Film Festival, The Welsh Chapel, London
2013 BA Graduate Show, Camberwell, University of the Arts London
2012 BA-SEShoreditch Townhall Basement, London
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AWARDS & RESIDENCIES
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2023-24. Artist Associate, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
2022 -23 Artist in Residence, Oxford University's Centre for Hindu Studies
2020 Joya: AirAlmeria, Spain (postponed)
2020 La Wayaka Chile, Panama (postponed)
2019 LADA (Live Art Development Agency) Residency with Lauren Barri Holstein, Hastings/London UK
2019 Trelex Esp'Asse, Nyon, Switzerland
2017 London Creative Network, SPACE, London
2015-16 Florence Trust Residency, The Florence Trust, London
2015 Listed for Winsor and Newton Painting PrizeGriffin Art Gallery
2014 Curious Duke Secret Art Prize for Painting (2nd prize), Curious Duke Gallery London
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EDUCATION
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2019 MA Painting Royal College of Art, London
2015 Image and imagination in Medieval EuropeThe Courtauld Institute of Art, London
2014 Old Masters Techniques & Painting from the BodyAngel Academy, Florence
2013 BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting, Camberwell, University of the Arts London
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PRESS
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2023 ARTIQ asks artists (PDF)
2022 Country and Town House, An Artist's Eye, July/August
2022 Independent Interview July (PDF)
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