City & Guilds MA Show 2025
In room after room you’ll find good hangs of highly skilled work from very competent artists. Superb drawings. Solid figurative. Skilled painters. Expert craft and technique applied to sculptures and a variety of other 3D mediums. There’s a lot to like from this year’s MA class… but not a lot of wow.
Aside from a few whole-room installs that felt a bit too forced, I mostly found myself admiring the high grade skills because I wasn’t that engaged by the subject matter. That’s not to say there weren’t some stand-out works or other things that captured my attention. Eight of them are listed below. But my overall assessment on leaving the show was that it had an abundance of technical execution and not enough conceptual ambition.
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Anna Pakosz (@pakoszanna) — ‘Green is the worst colour’, according to artist, so she’s punished it with rust and bleach and reconditioned it into something much more interesting.
Holly Hooper (@holly.anne.hooper) — Fuzzy flocking? Tasty textured biscuits? Nope. These organic abstract sconces are all glass.
Judy Maxwell-McNicol (@weemoodyjudy) — A trio of kinetic sculptures that ranged from gross to obscene were silly, shocking, and super hard to ignore.
Katya Kvasova (@katya.kvasova) — I’m a sucker for architectural renders, and was fascinated by the treatment that made these look like they’d been run through some kind of Pinterest filter.
Linda Simon (@linda_simon_artist) — I feel sorry for whoever buys this imposing wall of hundreds of free hanging interlocked coat hangers and then loses the install manual. IKEA, eat your heart out!
Paul Anderson Morrow (@paul_anderson_morrow) — The abstract compositions didn’t quite do it for me, but the creative blend of canvas, scraped wood and high gloss finish had me studying them carefully to figure out how they were made.
Six Hotchkiss (???) — I wasn’t that fussed about the forms, but the way these carved alabaster works were underlit made the cold stone come alive.
Zack Townsend (@zacktownsendprint) — It’s not often you see charcoal drawings at an MFA show, but these stark and striking works definitely earned their spot on the wall.
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Plan your visit
‘MA Show 2025’ runs 09-14 September, 2025.
Visit the MA event page or cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk and follow @cglartschool on Instagram for more info.
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