about rose
artist biography
Rose Arbuthnott (b. 1987, Cheltenham, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work gravitates towards an aesthetic of naivety and improvisation. Seemingly simple, the complexities of her work emerge through their exploration of colour, form, and space. By presenting these Modernist ideas through her straightforward visual language, Arbuthnott’s practice looks at our capability for interpretation and examines the idea of the allure.
Working across mediums including painting, performance, installation, sculpture and poetry, Arbuthnott’s style is uniquely her own. Her often non-representational and conceptual works are emotive and personal, with great visual intensity. Arbuthnott’s paintings range from landscapes, to figure studies, portraits and still lives. Frequently working in series’, she approaches each subject matter methodically, obsessively. Her recent ‘Grid’ paintings exemplify this working process. Developed over the summer of 2023, Arbuthnott’s grids utilise a cross-hatch structure rendered in various colours and proportions to explore concepts of space, shape, colour and form. She then pairs individual grid paintings together, in order to activate them as a unified set.
Arbuthnott’s work is inspired by a range of sources from recent art history, including Sean Scully, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, and the Bauhaus movement. Alongside visual allusions to these sources, Arbuthnott’s work is also self-referential. Working with found materials as well as painted and sculpted pieces, she will often remodel elements of existing works into new pieces. A long-standing example of this being ‘The Wall’; a series of stones from a wall in the garden of her family home in Gloucestershire that Arbuthnott has reconfigured various times into new installations over the past four years.
Arbuthnott grew up in the Gloucestershire countryside and ideas of the home and domesticity are visible throughout her work. Her mother’s profession as a textile designer can be considered a formative influence on the artist, particularly evident in her fascination with patterns and colour relationships. Themes of the environment and community are also present within Arbuthnott’s practice. As a child she planted trees and gardened. She later studied at Schumacher college, where she developed her knowledge of ecological matters. In 2011 Arbuthnott co-founded the Own Barn Residency in Cirencester. In return for working and living at the residency, participating artists are asked to host engagement workshops with the local community.
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Rose Arbuthnott was born in Cheltenham in 1987. She began painting in 1999 when a school teacher gave her a box of oil paints and asked her to copy Monet. In 2006 Arbuthnott pursued an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and Art History at Edinburgh University. She intercepted her studies at Edinburgh with a year at The Royal Drawing School in London. There she was awarded the esteemed Second Prize (2010). In 2008 Arbuthnott began as a Sculptor at the Pangolin Foundry, where she created wax moulds for sculptures. In June 2009, she worked to raise £70,000 for the advancement of a trial bowel cancer drug that helped to save her father’s life. Cetuximab has now been approved by NICE and is being used to treat NHS patients.
Arbuthnott co-founded ‘The Owl Barn’ Artist Residency in Gloucestershire in (2011); a community space for artists, makers and thinkers to develop their creative practice and engage with local community groups. She has since undertaken an artist residency at The First Food in Mexico (2014), and at the Xavier Project in Uganda (2015). Arbuthnott has developed her poetry with courses at Faber & Faber Publishing (2015), Goldsmiths University, London (2015), Ledbury (2019), and Arvon (2020). In 2018 she undertook a curating course at Central Saint Martins, London. In 2023 Arbuthnott graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture and a distinction for her thesis. She is currently undertaking a programme at MASS Art School in Woolwich, London.
Selected solo exhibitions include ‘He, She or They’ at Pintora Gallery, London, (2015), 'Still Lives', at Sixteen Gallery, Cheltenham, (2021) and ‘The Dowdry', at The Bothy, Cirencester, (2022). Selected Group Shows include, ‘Rose Arbuthnott and Alex Goodman: Tangled Roads, Journeys of the West Coast’, at Wetpaint Gallery, Stroud, (2015), ‘SOFT & HARD, Beyond Recognition and Queer Coding’, curated by Whiskey Chow for FESTUS 2023, (2023) and, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London (2023). In 2015 Arbuthnott was longlisted for the John Moore Painting Prize, at Tate, Liverpool.