Bianca Raffaella

The Women in Art Prize Exhibition

This exhibition marks Bianca Raffaella’s awards as Overall Winner of the 8th Women in Art Prize 2025, and winner of the Women in Art Printing Prize, presented at the British Library’s Pigott Theatre in September 2025. These awards are highlighted within a profile on the artist on the BBC World Service’s In the Studio audio documentary and podcast episode, Bianca Raffaella: A World of Blurred Vision, produced by Sahar Zand and released in January 2026.

Renowned for her evocative figurative and floral works that translate Raffaella’s perceptual experience through ethereal marks and layered surfaces, the exhibition is centred around Raffaella’s monoprint portraits, including the award-winning works from her suite of prints Just Out of Reach (2025), alongside the series She Cannot Fade (2025). Pushing the limits of traditional printmaking, Raffaella used the unexplored process of acrylic monoprinting to create the works in the exhibition. Working wet-on-wet with layers of acrylic and water, Raffaella paints directly onto reflective copper plates, primarily using her fingertips, before the surface dries, capturing fleeting impressions in quick, expressive gestures. This spontaneous, tactile process reflects her lived experience of visual impairment, translating uncertainty into a physical and creative act.

Portraits from Raffaella’s series She Cannot Fade emerge at varying proximities. Each print reveals different degrees of detail and distortion, mirroring the instability of visual perception and the intimacy of looking. These portraits are at once personal and abstract, offering a glimpse into the artist’s emotional relationship with visibility, identity, and memory. “Some of the prints are hardly there,” Raffaella notes, a reminder of the elusive, shifting nature of her own reflections.

Supporting the prints are tactile pieces designed by Bianca Raffaella to be touched, which visitors are invited to explore using their hands, to experience the portrait forms within Raffaella’s monoprints. The exhibition also presents a series of white-on-white textural floral reliefs that evoke the artist's experience of beauty in braille, which was how Raffaella first learned to read and write.