Anne Rothenstein's Choice Award 2025

Martha Zmpounou

Dressing Up

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Watercolour, Monoprint
Paper
90 x 110 cm

£2,100

“I am primarily a figurative artist exploring themes of reverie, loss and memory. My work deals with the intricacies and dynamics in human relationships, exploring nuances of emotions and the transition from visceral to cerebral. It delves into the intricate and co-dependent relationships between family, lovers and friends, and tries to look at how this shapes our identities and perceptions of the world. These connections form a web of shared memories and hidden tensions that come together, an assemblage of reconstructed memories. The human figures are seen as a layered, multifaceted entities, fragments in time. They are part of environments that blend reality, memory and imagination, at the crossroads of utopian idealism and the dark realities of human connections. In this sense, my work is a meditation on the failure of utopia, where the projected perfection and the dark reality of relationships at once reveal their beauty and the fragility. Working from personal archives, art historical and found imagery, the works are developed through multiple layers of watercolour paint either directly on paper, or through mono printing.”