Una Ursprung was born in Taiwan and now lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

Her work features a combination of oil painted serene and calm natural imagery with contrasting and sometimes chaotic abstract shapes rendered in spray paint directly over the top. The interplay between these two approaches to mark-making gives her work an ethereal feeling of separation: the canvas is both a portal to another world and a plane on which the abstract gestures are captured. It is as if the window through which we gaze upon these scenes of nature has been vandalised, and we are viewing outwards from within. Perhaps trapped.

The landscapes are earthy and subtle, and the gestures on top playfully vibrant. The interaction created is one of disquiet, as if the idyllic environment harbours something else. We are not viewing a utopian landscape but one that is perhaps more real and more honest.

Igor Moritz (B. 1996, Poland) is perhaps one of the most exciting early-career artists working today. In 2020 he was listed as one of the most in-demand artists on Artsy, alongside Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He is an artist we have worked with since we launched in 2018, being one of the winners of our ’18 Open Call and has gone from strength to strength since then. In 2019 we hosted a two person show with Igor Moritz and Kevin Perkins entitled A Long Way From Home, for which he created multiple canvases and works on paper.

His signature technique of conte-on-paper drawings is something that has captivated us at Delphian ever since we came across them, and so when the opportunity to host Igor’s debut UK solo show arose we knew we wanted works on paper. This particular body of work is his strongest yet, and the way he renders the subjects (often intimate friends of his) in a distorted yet beautiful way calls to mind artists such as Egon Schiele and Henri Matisse.

Our assertion that he is an exciting and important artist is not because we are showing his work, rather the opposite: we are showing his work because he is an exciting and important artist. We see very big things in Igor’s career, and indeed these are already starting to happen. Still in his twenties, it won’t be long before he is a household name. We are very honoured to have been working with Igor from such an early stage of his career, and feel very lucky to be hosting his debut UK solo show. 

London based artist Rhiannon Salisbury’s work investigates the glossy representation of women to expose an absurd dystopian reality of the capitalist dream.

Her process begins from selecting through an archive of advertisement imagery sourced through high-end beauty campaigns online and magazines. The resulting paintings show the disturbance caused by the social pressures born of the mass media machine. The images morph into a synthetic chaotic mush which seeks to simultaneously allure and repel the viewer. In decontextualising the original image through the subjective lens of painting, Salisbury engages with an otherwise unobtainable dialogue of beauty.

Inspired by serious literary and philosophical works such as The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rhiannon decontextualises and distorts the vernacular image in such a way to render it eerily familiar, yet entirely alien.

Rhiannon was the overall winner of our second Delphian Open Call, beating over 10,000 entries.