Overview

Please join us for the opening of Sibylla Martin’s solo exhibition Paintings for an Anxious Age on Wednesday 23 July from 6 - 8pm.  

"What moves and interests me is colour, I crave the smell and feel of oil paint and I love what it can do. The tension between colours moves me deeply and what you can make them do is the challenge. My Ukrainian grandfather’s interest in geometric abstract art coloured my visual experience and embedded in me an enduring and instinctive inclination towards the abstract. Studying at the Slade School in London and travels to Italy gave me a disciplined grounding. I developed a rigorous painting technique with the use of traditional materials and proportion learnt from the early Renaissance painters. These two influences share a formality that is evident in my own work."

Though a lover of nature, Sibylla has never been drawn to depicting the romantic landscape preferring instead to allow the colours an shapes around her to insert themselves into her abstract paintings. 

Sibylla graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1991, winning various prizes whilst studying there. She moved to Kenya in 2004 after working as a nurse in Rwanda and Burundi for some years. Her first exhibition in Nairobi was a solo exhibition at RaMOMA in 2006 and she was one of the six artists who participated in Circle’s celebrated first exhibition Abstract Extract Subtract in 2013, she has since exhibited in various group exhibitions in Kenya and the UK.