About Artist Selected Artworks News Exhibitions

About Artist

The origins of Natasha Michaels’ monoprints lie in historical portraits from the renaissance to the 19th century. Exploring challenging and at times up-ending traditional conventions and genres, Michaels’ work is an investigation of her own ambivalence towards the originals. At once subverting and celebrating, she uses her own expressive language to recast and direct the sitters, reimagining them as fictional characters. The subjects often appear uncomfortable or perplexed as Michaels plays with ideas of power, gender and artifice directing the viewer to consider their status.

Michaels’ process adds to this unstable mutant world. Beginning with the reversal of the original image. Gestural brushstrokes, slips and smears combined with the sharp boundaries of the cut aluminium plates reveal strange chimeras on the paper. Unsettlingly recognisable yet unfamiliar, they hover between high art and pop culture. Michaels makes multiple versions of each print constantly experimenting and adapting her approach as if engaged in a conversation with the original sitters and the emerging versions of themselves.

Selected Artworks

News

NEWS

Natasha Michaels has a new body of work and portraiture that will be exhibited by Rabley Gallery at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2023.

Part old masters, part cartoons the works hint at contemporary notions of importance and beauty such as celebrity, social media filters and cosmetic procedures and create painterly composites against flat indeterminate backgrounds. The sitters appear, to themselves as well as the viewer uncertain of their identity and context.

Exhibitions

EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED GROUP AND SOLO)
2023
Summer Exhibition, Rabley Gallery, Wiltshire
Oxmarket Contemporary Intermission
London Art Fair, Rabley Gallery, Islington
London Original Print Fair, Rabley Gallery, Somerset House
The Darkling Night, Rabley Gallery, Wiltshire
IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair, Rabley Gallery, New York,
2022
The Darkling Night, Rabley Gallery
London Original Print Fair, Rabley Gallery, Somerset House
The RWA Secret Postcard
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
Oxmarket Contemporary
Wells Art Contemporary
Jelous Gallery ARCHERBOURJOISMICHAELSPOPESMALLHORN
2021
Discerning Eye
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Everywoman Biennial
Acedia at Purslane Art
Art on a postcard
An Intimate Distance – Eileen Cooper RA, Craigie Aitchison RA, Natasha Micheals and Jo Taylor, Rabley Gallery.
2020

Rabley Gallery Summer Exhibition

LOPF September – Feature Artist with Rabley Gallery
2019

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair RE National Original Print
2018

Dark Side of the moon, Hexagon Classic Design
2017

RE Masters of Monoprint, Bankside, London

AWARDS / RESIDENCIES
Ushaw Residency and Acquisition Prize 2022
Oxarket Contemporary Prize 2022
Jealous Prize 2021
Jill Bullen Memorial Award 2019 at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
Residency London Print Studio 2017

EDUCATION
MA Royal College of Art Illustration – 1994 – 1996
St Martins School of Art Communication Design – 1989 – 92