Atalanta Xanthe (b. 1996) grew up in the UK and New Mexico, USA, and now lives and works in London. Xanthe received her Undergraduate at University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art (2014-2016) and her Postgraduate MFA: New York Academy of Art (2016-2018). On graduating, at 21, she became the New York Academy of Art’s youngest Fellow (2018-2019). Her work has been exhibited extensively internationally in the UK, USA, Italy, France, and Germany. Notable solo exhibitions include ‘Uteroverse’, Alice Black Gallery, London, UK (2022); and ‘Atalanta Xanthe- Scaffold for the Imagination’, Galleria Alessandro Albanese, Milan, Italy (2023). Xanthe is the recipient of the prestigious Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Competition (2013) and the David Schafer Portrait Award (2017). Xanthe is featured in the permanent collections of the Ruth Borchard Collection, UK and the Marval Collection, Italy.

Xanthe’s is a world of fantastical surrealism - a beguiling collision of nature and artifice. Her painterly dramas, tantalisingly ambiguous, are a space for free-wheeling and re- imagining. Xanthe is influenced by stagecraft and the world of theatre; mischievously splicing aspects of her own biography with elements of the art historical canon and popular culture to create plots which are permeable, stretchy and, at times, magnificently unhinged. A practice rooted in drawing, Xanthe teases out her compositions and narratives over the course of many preliminary studies before embarking on the final painting. Knowingly riffing on the scale and seriality of History Paintings, a genre traditionally depicting male heroism or grand events, Xanthe’s ability to vault, jump headlong, sprint or glide effortlessly across the canvas is testament to her love of paint and the purist act of applying pigment to canvas in the name of storytelling. Xanthe’s singular stylistic flair and clearly identifiable hand constitute a feminist reclamation of narrative through paint.

Xanthe accounts, “Having been raised in a household of scientists, I need the stories I tell to anchor to reality. But the anchor chain needs to be long - I’m contrarian by nature. I love facts: documented ones, like strange historical occurrences, weird bits of biology, or visual ones, like Andreas Mantegna’s obsessive need for order. Each painting coalesces after a great hoovering up of information”. One such subject matter anchor was the discovery of her sperm-brother, which evolved into her ‘Uteroverse’ Series, depicting the travails of anthropomorphised sperm as they go on a pilgrim’s progress through a cunning and mercurial Uteroverse. Unfolding across seven 5 ft x 7ft paintings, the works explore the relationships between sibling-sperm in a world where randomness rules and where the landscape outwits the sojourner.

selected works