Congratulations to recent graduates Ross Head and Fan Bangyu 范 邦宇  who have received the 2024 Almacantar Studio Prize and an Almacantar Award respectively.

Ross Head
"The ways that desire is performed and expressed is central to my practice. Through my compositions, I create a world for intimate moments and gestures that explore queerness, masculinity, gender and body image. The handling of paint has its own narrative potential - the thick textures, colour-filled space, and delicate marks are all active in the stories being created. I avidly collect images and draw upon film stills, archival imagery and sports photography. The archive becomes a site for imagining - in the process of painting, scenes become less specific to time and place and allude more toward an alternative reality. Drawing on the relationship that homosexuality and other non-normative identities have with modern and contemporary architecture, my paintings contain an element of fantasy and celebrate theatricality."

Fan Bangyu on If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste, The New Angel Series 2024
“……it is the combination of the materials and my identity. I appropriately rooted my daily politics as a descendant of the working class and a gender-fluid sexual minority. It responds to and affirms those who are excluded by subject and structure, yet these subjects and structures rely on the existence and boundary definitions of these marginalised bodies (abjection to define themselves in turn. I attempt to construct a heterogeneous space through non-linear literary metaphors, a scene full of intricate details, using this constructivist approach to abstract a suspended view. I emphasise the distance of viewing, the distance between the work and the viewer. Through re-contextualisation, with underlying narrative elements such as love, desire, indulgence, fetish, symmetry, and rituals, these works develop new narratives while serving as moments of nostalgia and imagination……”