Alex Roberts is a painter whose practice perceives transient fragility and open ambiguity, mirroring painting itself. Through perception and material play, she explores the spectacle and non‑reveal of identity, change and encounters – often inspired by fleeting, awkward, overlooked or non‑verbal meetings that quietly shape how we understand one another.

Seeking the point where process and materiality exceed intention, Alex creates artworks where traces converge, diverge and intersect.  Colour, transparency and form operate as active agents: gestural movements conjure spatial tensions, collapsing and reopening the relationship between pictorial frame, surface flatness and curated space.  Effecting hues and translucence - layers develop with persistent pace change to test the sliding scales of appearance.  Compositions absorb traces of people and lived experience, allowing impressions to surface and settle as memory and mark.

By examining the expansive aspects of body language, hints of narrative, performativity and embodiment that equate with painting the work probes relationships between our mental carrying and physical embodiment, and the entanglement of living and painting. Charged by these series of studio relationships often the candid paintings’, sensitive installations implicate or stage the viewer as protagonist.  

Predominantly working with female subjects (via varying surfaces, scale) the work exposes the un-fixedness of witnessed, projected, and speculated portraits and empathetic signs – presenting the unseen that more often mirrors all reality.  Exploring painted unease between what is public and what is private: how, in today’s digital world, appearance often contrasts with reality and sociability belies intimacy.

Alex exhibits internationally, currently: a finalist for the inaugural Hogarth Prize, Hogarth’s House, London (28 July – 6 September), and is selected by guest curator, Hannah Kori for her upcoming, Open Call groupshow, HOTO X at HOTO Gallery Berlin (14 – 29 August).

Other examples: You Shed Your Names With The Seasons, 50MV Liverpool; Compositions, Kunstraum Braugasse / Kulturfabrik e.V., Hoyerswerda (2026); The Problem with People, Oceans Apart Gallery, Salford – Manchester; Splinters of Angst Derelict, Hua International Berlin (2025); Close To The Edge, Spor Klübü, Berlin (2024); Once Guarded, KHBStudios Berlin Art Week (2022); Wells Art Contemporary 2020; Happy Hour, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery - London Bridge (2019); PaintLounge BERLIN; Control to Collapse, Blyth Gallery, London (2018); St. Paul’s Cathedral; What Hat am I Wearing Today? Paul Abbott and Alex Roberts, MOCA London (2017).

Awards: Hogarth Prize (finalist); Contemporary Art Collectors Book Volume I (featured artist); The Waverton Art Prize (long-listed); Ever Emerging, The Berlin Edition (featured artist); Jackson’s Open Painting Prize (listed); AA2A residency - Bucks New University; Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust; The Eaton Fund; ACE & British Council Grant - The Artists' International Development Fund; HIX Award (finalist); The Red Mansion Art Prize and Contemporary Visions VI, Beers London (short-listed).  

Alex sporadically curates art exhibitions and platforms of exchange which seek to examine how painting beholds the viewer.  Gestural Reflective & Inquiring Tales (G.R.I.T.) at Kunstpunkt Berlin & Drawing Projects UK, Scotland (2024) being the latest.  The Performativity of Painting at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich (2018), prior.

Alex completed her MAFA at Chelsea College of Arts, following earlier study at the University of the Arts London (2D Digital Design for Communication) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University of Reading.  She is the Lecturer in Drawing at Duncan Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, and a Guest Lecturer at Bauhaus Summer School, Bauhaus‑Universität Weimar.  Alex lives and works between Berlin and Dundee.