RCA Graduate Show 2025
There are approximately 2,850 students at the Royal College of Art, according to Google’s AI Overview, which must be correct because it feels like that many people have put up work at this year’s degree show. With rare exception there’s at least 3-4 students sharing even the smallest display rooms, and since a vast majority have only displayed one work the entire experience feels like navigating a Vegas breakfast buffet. There’s way too many tasty things vying for space on your plate and I soon found that I was giving short shrift to good work because I couldn’t stop thinking… maybe something better is lurking just around the corner?
My first stop was the Painting Building, which as expected was filled with exceptional talent in almost every room. Every style and genre was represented with no single dominating theme, although it’s telling that the works that caught my attention were almost solely figurative. There were plenty of abstracts (my usual preference) but none of them explored anything new or exciting in the genre.
Next door in the Garage nothing enticed me to engage (sorry, Curating Contemporary Art MFAs!) and walking through the Humanities MFA rooms felt like I was judging booths at a science & social studies fair. Pass.
In the Sculpture wing just under 100 students are showing (there’s a list and I counted) and since none of them are making demure tabletop ceramics I spent more time trying to carefully navigate my way around the crazy obstacle course of artworks than admiring them. Large sculptures need room to breathe and it’s frustrating that you can’t stand back far enough to admire most of these without bumping into or having your view obscured by another one. And since there’s barely enough room for both artwork and visitors, all the students sit in rows of chairs lined up outside each booth, staring at you expectantly when you leave like an eager junior footballer hoping the coach will sub them in during extra time. It’s awkward, but not as awkward as the Contemporary Art Practice MA show on the third floor.
“The programme serves as an incubator for ideas, experiments, collaborations and conversations” and while it’s clear that the floor is filled with ahead-of-the-curve ideas that I’m sure will filter into future shows and exhibitions, seeing all of them together felt like a contest of who could shout the loudest. It’s a visual assault of extravagant installations that randomly jarred from one to the next, often located so close together that it was hard to tell when one ended and another began. Maybe I should have started and not ended here, and quite possibly my brain was extra frazzled by viewing a student degree show on the hottest day of the year.
If you’re a gallery or collector with a specific focus in mind then none of what you just read will impact your experience. But I feel sorry for casual art fans, and even the students that are showing, because the overwhelming overload, seemingly hung randomly with no curatorial consideration towards pairing things together, means the only way to effectively navigate nine floors of work is to treat it like a dating app and adopt a brash ‘swipe right’ attitude. That unfortunately means a lot of good artists are going to get lost in the shuffle, because at shows like this what ends up getting noticed isn’t always the exceptional, it’s whatever manages to stand out from the things immediately surrounding it.
Artists featured in the photos:
Alice Wisden (alicewisden.com)
Amelia Cross (ameliacross.com)
Katie Kaur (katiekaur.com)
Lyla Dushas (lyladushas.com)
Chiedu Okonta (@chieduokonta)
Usaydh Agha (usaydh.com)
Tallulah Hutson (@tallulahdrawstuff)
Jihoon Cho (@zihoonzo)
Jinseul Park (@jinthelier)
Ruby Read (rubyread.art)
Gemma Holzer (@gemma.holzer)
Elspeth Vince (elspethvince.co.uk)
Artists in the video:
Tongues: Louise Wan (@wlyvlo)
Bowling Balls: Liszu Tan (@liszutan)
String & Video: Yingchen Mu (@muyingchench)
Plan your visit
‘RCA2025’ runs 19-22 June.
Visit the RCA event page for more info about the venue, opening times, visitor info & performance listings.
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