Biography
Born in 1980 in Wegberg, Germany, Laura New is a British artist who lives and works in the UK. She studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design in 1998 before moving on to a degree in Fine Art in 2000 at the former Hornsey School of Art (Viv Albertine, Allen Jones, Anish Kapoor) as part of Middlesex University. The industrial warehouse spaces in ‘The Chocolate Factory’ allowed her the ability to explore and develop her practice on a very large scale and spent she spent the majority of her time creating huge systems of interlocking canvasses of over 5 metres which enabled her to stretch her boundaries in painting.
After achieving her degree she continued elaborating on the themes she had touched upon but changed her practice to a much smaller and more detailed scale to include drawing studies of taxidermy, particularly avian, and entomology. She began collecting resin encased insects and Victorian taxidermy birds, as well as visiting the Natural History Museums, Angela Marmont Centre, to draw many of the specimens that date back to Darwin’s original collections.
Laura has worked at the Royal Academy of Arts, Mayfair, London for over 10 years in an operational capacity working alongside a large team on the install and desinstall of large scale internationally touring exhibitions and historic retrospectives. As part of this role she has herself curated over 50 exhibitions of work by artists who work at the RA since 2012. In addition she also creates commissioned illustration work, working to briefs to create vinyl covers, merchandise designs and book illustrations.
Laura has exhibited widely in group and collaborative exhibitions at various galleries including Collyer Bristow Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Mall Galleries in London, as well as a variety of artist led spaces such as Espacio Gallery, Hoxton Arches and I'klectik Art Lab. She has exhibited internationally at Sao La Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and LPM Gallery, Texas, USA as part of a collaborative project exploring the construct of femininity through the group ‘Sweet ‘Art’. This also involved creating work specifically for a group exhibition over three floors in a South London warehouse space on Tanner Street in London Bridge and her work was published in the accompanying book ‘SHE’ released in December 2016. Laura’s series of drawings on wood panel; ‘Eyes Closed’ were requested for inclusion in the three month exhibition ‘Face Value’ at Collyer Bristow Gallery (2016) by the curator Kathleen Soriano alongside other portrait works by artists such as Paul Benney, Stephen Chambers RA, Eileen Cooper RA, Sadie Lee, Chris Levine and Tai Shan Schierenberg.
Laura’s work, defined by favouring draughtsmanship and drawing in ink on paper or panel as well as working digitally and
Laura is also a regular participant of Karen Aston’s Art Car Boot Fair, creating work just for the fair for several months. This fair is an exclusive event with other participating artists such as Tracey Emin, Sir Peter Blake, Polly Morgan, Gavin Turke, Charmig Baker, Bob & Roberta Smith and many more.