Maria, Studio 5

Kayoon Anderson was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1997. After studying architecture at the University of Cambridge, she completed a painting course at Siena Art Institute before returning to England. She reached the semi-final of SkyArts Portrait Artist of the Year, encouraging her to pursue a diploma in portraiture at Heatherley School of Art which she recently completed, now focusing on figurative work in her studio in London.

The spaces in her paintings contain people, but the people aren’t the focus. They sit within the architecture as a part of it, without clear distinction between them and their surroundings. She aims to create a feeling of calm and grounded spaces. Kayoon says "my background in architecture perhaps pushes me to strive for stable and balanced compositions."

She looks to early Italian Renaissance art and Korean Munbangdo still life paintings – both are structured with a strong sense of design, and both create spaces that sit somewhere between naturalistic and abstract. "This is also something I aim to achieve through the combination of patterned elements, areas of flat colour, and realistic representation of flesh."

'My paintings are an exploration of the interplay of pattern, flat colour and naturalistic representation, with the aim of creating a space that sits between realism and abstraction' — Kayoon Anderson