The Radar: Elsa Rouy, Julia Kowalska and Clark Keatley

Elsa Rouy

London-based artist Elsa Rouy seeks to uncover and interrogate her personal experiences as a woman through her paintings. Rouy challenges the physical constraints we perceive, where bodies transform and intertwine, skins meld together and fluids mingle in a dance of metamorphosis. Rouy views bodies not as static entities, but as dynamic sites of perpetual change and evolution.

Age: 24

Location: London, UK

Last dream you had: It involved an imprint of a beached whale with a dead body in the centre

Favourite exhibition: There are too many from contemporary artists, so I’ll simplify and say ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child’ at The Hayward Gallery

Favourite object you own: It’s not really an object, but my goldfish

Favourite art-world Instagram account: @campbell.hector

Favourite movie: When I was a kid it was Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride

Favourite artwork: Again, too many, but maybe Two Things are True (2022) by Ambera Wellmann or anything by Ana Mendieta

End-of-year goals: Just focusing on today

Julia Kowalska

Polish artist Julia Kowalska uses seductive aesthetics to delve into the fluid nature of the self and the complexities of desire, examining beauty and femininity within hierarchical structures and the biopolitics of the body. She focuses on the relationships and dependencies among women—sisters, mothers, and daughters—highlighting the dual nature of tenderness and care intertwined with domination and oppression. This tension between passive and active attitudes is central to her work, emphasizing the evolving perspective of the female gaze and illuminating the complex and often contradictory nature of female experiences and identities.

Age: 26

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Last dream you had: I was walking somewhere in a mad rush, I don’t remember where but it was hellishly hot

Favourite exhibition: ‘Paint, also known as blood, women, affect, and desire in contemporary painting’ at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019

Favourite object you own: Red coffee cups from the 70s. I’m attached to the tableware I own in general

Favourite art-world Instagram account: @mepaintsme

Favourite movie: Impossible to choose

Favourite artwork: Same, impossible to choose!!

Loves: Horses, blueberries, wandering

Hates: Heat

End-of-year goals: To work with more discipline

Clark Keatley

Clark Keatley studied at Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools. His work considers how the experience of the world is mediated through objects. Cultural signifiers interest him as a form of shared language that can be reconfigured to describe phenomena in society.

Age: 37

Location: Liverpool, UK

Last dream you had: Something messy

Favourite exhibition: Of recent, it would be Lutz Bacher at Raven Row or Raymond Briggs at Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft

Favourite object you own: A piece of furniture my Grampy made for me out of wood from a piece of furniture his parents got for their wedding present

Favourite art-world Instagram account: @jackson_pillock

Favourite movie: Papillon (the 1973 Steve McQueen version)

Favourite artwork: Tax Collector and his Wife (so-called Money Changer and his Wife) by Marinus van Reymerswale. I was also really into The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake last year. I painted my own version to have up in my flat

Loves: Long train journeys

Hates: Writing endless applications

End-of-year goals: To start another book of drawings, it’s been six years since the last one