57. Hannah Tilson - Pretext to Explode

2024
Distemper and lino on transparent fabric
20 x 20 cm

Hannah Tilson (b. 1995) lives and works in London. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, printmaking and installation, using layered translucent and opaque pigments to construct fragmented, pattern-filled spaces where figures dissolve into fabrics and interiors. Bodies intermittently emerge through glimpses of a hand, a shoe or a gesture, creating shifting compositions that destabilise perception and blur distinctions between figure and ground, reality and illusion.

Tilson studied at Central Saint Martins, the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with a BA in 2018, and later completed The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in 2021. In 2016, she undertook an exchange programme at the New York Studio School.

Her recent residencies include Palazzo Monti (2022), the Plop Residency, London (2024), and Grafische Werkstatt Traklhaus in 2025 and 2026. She also participated in the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon auction in 2024.

Recent exhibitions include Staged Surfaces (2025), a solo exhibition at Cedric Bardawil; Bridge-Brücke at Traklhaus, Salzburg; Patterns of Intimacy at MINT; Fierce Form at Baert Gallery; and Phantom Brush at A Plus A Gallery. Her work has also been shown at the London Original Print Fair, the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Flowers Gallery, White Conduit Projects, Bonhams and the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition.

In 2025, Tilson curated Art on a Postcard’s International Women’s Day Auction, continuing her engagement with collaborative and charitable contemporary art projects.