Her work is “absurd, messy, serious and funny in terms” (according to the Eliza Bonham Carter, director of the Royal Academy Schools). The Swiss Canadian artist and musician Daria Blum is the inaugural recipient of the Claridges Royal Academy Schools Art Prize, awarded to the 2023 RA Graduate last by judges Yinka Shonibare and Eva Rothschild last year. Blum’s enthralling and encompassing practice interrogates architectural structures and environments and their effect on how bodies move through space, drawing on her background as a ballet dancer, as well as her matrilineal history in dance, tracing shifting political and social values through dominant theories and ideas.

Blum’s richly researched practice expands across several mediums, and for this solo show at Claridge’s ArtSpace, visitors will find the gallery utterly transformed with a multisensory, experiential installation of new works, including a raised metre-wide walkway around the perimeter of the space, where the artist will perform periodically throughout the show’s month-long run; theatre lights, sculptures, photographs and a three-channel video work.

The narrative premise of the exhibition follows a fictional character through an abandoned office building who discovers a cachet of materials; here the real and the invented blur as portraits of Blum’s late grandmother, the Ukrainian ballerina and choreographer Daria Nyzankiwska, appear, interwoven with archival recordings of dance rehearsals, and footage of a 2022 performance by Blum herself. An unmissable debut from a daring young artist who is undoubtedly on the rise.