Artist Serena Curmi has been based at Jamaica Street Studios in Bristol for over a decade. She spent her childhood travelling and sailing around the world, including the US, Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe, before completing an art and design foundation course and a BA (Hons) in Illustration at Falmouth College of Arts, graduating in 2001. After several years working as an illustrator, Serena turned to fine art painting.
In her landscape oil paintings, Serena explores themes based on time and the impermanence of the natural world, drawing inspiration from vintage photography while tapping into memories of extensive travel to many parts of the world, both as a child and as an adult. She is fascinated by the way mark-making and painting techniques can be a vehicle to convey the effects that light, weather, the passage of time and human intervention can have on a landscape.
Shrouded in mist or half-clad in snow, softened at the edges or crowned with razor-sharp peaks, towering over pine forests or glacial lakes, mountains loom up against sunless skies in the artist’s monochrome and limited palette paintings. Flat areas of pink and gold heighten their otherworldly nature.
Serena’s process involves both control and chance, which results in landscapes that are both familiar and strange, sitting somewhere between abstraction and representation. She manipulates the painted surface, creating myriad layers and forms as she gradually obscures and exposes underlying marks and textures.
Serena exhibits both nationally and internationally and her paintings are regularly selected for juried open shows including, most recently, Wells Art Contemporary (2024), the Chelsea Art Society Summer Exhibition (2024), the RWA Annual Open Exhibition (2024, 2022, 2020) and the ING Discerning Eye (2022, 2020 and 2019). Recent groups shows include with Art Acumen at the Lanesborough Hotel in 2023, Cube Gallery in London in 2023, Irving Gallery in Oxford in 2022 and Gala Fine Art/ArtDog London in Aldeburgh in 2022, and a solo exhibition at Hybrid Gallery in Honiton in 2020. In 2018, she was chosen as a finalist for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize for her portrait series ‘Bedlam Case Studies’.
Serena’s work is also regularly shown at art fairs and gallery exhibitions throughout the UK and abroad, including London Art Fair in 2024 with GBS Fine Art. We have regularly exhibited Serena’s paintings on our stand at Battersea Affordable Art Fair Spring since 2021 (most recently in March 2025) and were delighted to show her paintings at Brussels Affordable Art Fair for the first time in February 2025.
