The shortlisted artists of the BUAT Curatorial Award 2026 represent a diverse and carefully selected group of contemporary practices, united by strong visual identity, conceptual depth and artistic maturity. Through painting, drawing, sculpture and mixed media, their works engage with memory, body, identity, myth, history and the psychological pressures of the present. This selection reflects BUAT Gallery’s curatorial interest in artists whose work can enter into dialogue with both historical artistic traditions and contemporary cultural experience.
Giorgi Kobiashvili’s work develops a powerful dialogue between sacred iconography, political memory and contemporary psychological tension. Working across large-scale painting, wood panel, metal, acrylic, oil and mixed media, he transforms familiar religious and historical forms into images of rupture, endurance and collective trauma. His figures often appear suspended between martyrdom, witness and collapse, while the material surface carries the weight of damage, time and symbolic reconstruction. In works such as Christ the Sacrifice, Christ the Host, System, The Transfiguration of the Mind, Crucifixion and The Kiss of Judas, Kobiashvili creates a visual language where faith, power, violence and human vulnerability become inseparable. His practice stands out for its monumental ambition and its ability to connect historical imagery with urgent contemporary experience.
Austen Brantley’s figurative sculpture brings together classical form, African cultural memory and contemporary reflections on resilience, identity and inheritance. Working in bronze, ceramic, granite and patinated surfaces, he creates figures that carry both physical presence and symbolic weight. His sculptures often appear calm and introspective, yet they are charged with narratives of ancestry, spiritual endurance and the burden of history. Works such as Mountain, Mami Wata, Venus, Earth Angel and Inner World Dream demonstrate his ability to merge realism with mythic and archetypal imagery. Brantley’s practice establishes a dialogue between ancient traditions and present-day experience, giving sculptural form to perseverance, dignity and the continuity of human memory across cultures and generations
Marie Louise Elshout creates a distinctive visual world where human, animal and mythological forms merge into hybrid figures of memory, transformation and symbolic ambiguity. Her works combine pencil, charcoal, acrylic, oil and organic materials, producing images that feel at once historical, theatrical and strangely contemporary. Drawing on portraiture, vanitas, fairy-tale imagery and animal symbolism, Elshout stages figures that challenge fixed categories of identity and species. Works such as Vanitas#9, Hybrid#16 (Octopuses), Hybrid#22 (MegaBat), Hybrid#23 (Wolf) and Hybrid#9 (Xōlōitzcuintles) reveal a mature artistic language rooted in metamorphosis, vulnerability and the unsettling beauty of the in-between. Her long exhibition history in the Netherlands and abroad further confirms the depth and consistency of her artistic practice.
Ferhat Salman’s practice is marked by an intense exploration of the body, fear, memory and the unstable boundaries of the self. His paintings and drawings often place the human figure in a state of psychological exposure, where identity appears fragmented, pressured or transformed by forces beyond its control. Across large-scale oil paintings and charcoal works on paper, Salman develops a raw, expressive language in which faces, bodies and birds become carriers of anxiety, pain and inner metamorphosis. His self-portrait series is especially significant: the artist positions the self as an “other,” creating a visual field where the individual is both subject and witness. Through this tension, Salman’s work gives form to vulnerability, existential unease and the fragile persistence of human presence.
KA Bird’s painting practice examines the increasingly blurred relationship between the human body, digital culture and systems of invisible control. Based between Newcastle and Barcelona, Bird uses digital media as a structural source for painting and print-making, developing images that reflect the strange psychological atmosphere of a world shaped by networks, surveillance, image circulation and behavioural prediction. Her figures often appear isolated, fragmented or caught within domestic and social spaces charged with unease. Bodies are disassembled, reconfigured and placed in scenes where something outside the visible frame seems to act upon them. Through layered processes of projection, stencil, airbrush and painterly construction, Bird creates works that speak to contemporary anxiety: the feeling that our choices remain personal, even as the conditions of choice have already been shaped elsewhere.