25 February – 8 March 2026
The Art Academy, London
The Women in Art Prize and the Art Academy are pleased to announce
Bianca Raffaella: The Women in Art Prize Exhibition, presenting recent work by the British artist and activist Bianca Raffaella. The exhibition runs from 25 February to 8 March 2026 at the Art Academy, 185 Park Street, London SE1 9BL, concluding on International Women’s Day, Sunday 8 March 2026.
A Private View will take place on Thursday 26 February 2026, 6–8.30pm.
Bianca Raffaella, Just out of Reach – Close, 2025, Monoprint, 71 x 50.5 cm, (c) The Artist, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
The Women in Art Prize is a Community Interest Company dedicated to championing women artists and addressing their historic exclusion from institutions, collections, and public spaces. Submissions for the 9th Women in Art Prize will open on 8 March 2026, in celebration of International Women’s Day, and close on 9 June 2026. Submission fees and commissions from sales generated by the Bianca Raffaella exhibition will be reinvested in full to support women artists through prizes, exhibitions, mentoring, and professional opportunities, ensuring sustained visibility and long-term impact.
The exhibition marks Raffaella’s awards as Overall Winner of the 8th Women in Art Prize 2025, and winner of the Women in Art Printing Prize, presented at the British Library’s Pigott Theatre in September 2025. These awards are highlighted within a profile on the artist on the BBC World Service’s In the Studio audio documentary and podcast episode, Bianca Raffaella: A World of Blurred Vision, produced by Sahar Zand and released in January 2026.
Renowned for her evocative figurative and floral works that translate Raffaella’s perceptual experience through ethereal marks and layered surfaces, the exhibition is centred around Raffaella’s monoprint portraits, including the award-winning works from her suite of prints Just Out of Reach (2025), alongside the series She Cannot Fade (2025).
Pushing the limits of traditional printmaking, Raffaella used the underexplored process of acrylic monoprinting to create the works in the exhibition. Working wet-on-wet with layers of acrylic and water, Raffaella paints directly onto reflective copper plates, primarily using her fingertips, before the surface dries, capturing fleeting impressions in quick, expressive gestures. This spontaneous, tactile process reflects her lived experience of visual impairment, translating uncertainty into a physical and creative act.
Portraits from Raffaella’s series She Cannot Fade emerge at varying proximities. Each print reveals different degrees of detail and distortion, mirroring the instability of visual perception and the intimacy of looking. These portraits are at once personal and abstract, offering a glimpse into the artist’s emotional relationship with visibility, identity, and memory. “Some of the prints are hardly there,” Raffaella notes, a reminder of the elusive, shifting nature of her own reflections.
The title of the series She Cannot Fade draws from Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, published in 1820, chosen by the artist for its quiet insistence on presence and preservation. The phrase also recalls advice once given to Raffaella’s mother by her early medical consultants: “see what she can see, and not what she can’t see.” This idea resonates throughout the show as a quietly radical approach to both disability and perception.
Each monoprint is a one-off, unrepeatable and resistant to reproduction. The works balance fragility and resilience, creating space for viewers to contemplate their own ways of seeing, knowing, and connecting. Inviting us to pause in the uncertain spaces between clarity and obscurity, the prints offer a rare sensory encounter with the world as experienced through the artist’s eyes.
Supporting the prints are tactile pieces designed by Bianca Raffaella to be touched, which visitors are invited to explore using their hands, to experience the portrait forms within Raffaella’s monoprints. An audio guide will also be available.
The exhibition also presents a series of white-on-white textural floral reliefs that evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how Raffaella first learned to read and write.
The exhibition will conclude on International Women’s Day, Sunday 8 March, with a talk by Bianca Raffaella at 1pm.
With support from Flowers Gallery, London.
About Bianca Raffaella (b.1992, London)
Working from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation, Bianca Raffaella is a British artist and activist. As a partially sighted artist, her ephemeral floral and figurative works draw viewers into her world by capturing fleeting moments suspended in “persistent vision,” where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light.
©Antonio Parente
In 2016, Raffaella was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University in the Visual Arts, with a First-Class Honours degree, and was awarded the NatWest Entrepreneurship Funding Prize in 2019 for her bespoke sensory fashion label. In 2025 and 2021, Raffaella’s work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, coordinated by Farshid Moussavi RA and Yinka Shonibare, respectively. In 2023, her solo exhibition, Hushed Impressions, was shown at Orleans House Gallery. She completed a residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) in 2023/4 and was selected by Dame Tracey Emin for Flowers Gallery’s 2024 Artist of the Day series, presenting a one-day solo exhibition as part of the programme’s 25th edition. In 2025,
Bianca Raffaella was awarded Overall Winner of the 8th Women in Art Prize, and the winner of the Women in Art Printing Prize. In Spring 2026, Bianca Raffaella’s work will be featured in Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today, at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.
An advocate for accessibility in the arts, Raffaella has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institut’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panellist at Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art. She is a member of Layers of Vision and in 2025 participated in an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Eye Health and Visual Impairment, developing policy recommendations to guide the improvement of access and inclusion programmes for BPS people in UK-based museums.
Press enquiries and images:
[email protected]
Exhibition opening times:
Monday – Sunday: 10:00 – 17:00