Viewing Vanessa Raw, On Earth We Weren’t Meant To Stay at Carl Freedman Gallery

Supporters of her work already include the likes of Tracey Emin – and it’s easy to see why Vanessa Raw is the woman of the moment. Her solo exhibition at Carl Freedman opens this week and runs all summer long, with the intriguing title Vanessa Raw, On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay.

Visitors can expect to see a whole new body of Raw’s work, a continuation of her themes of women’s pleasure (sexual or not) that shift the gaze towards a female-centred point of view, not totally free of objectification but doing away with the usual power dynamics.

Nature – another of Raw’s recurrent interests – also plays an important role in these new oil paintings, bodies cavorting in blissful pastoral landscapes and among symbolic animals, sometimes representing the intrusion of a threatening malevolence creeping in from outside to disrupt the harmony. We can’t wait to see how the young British artist has developed since we last saw her works in a solo show at Frieze last year.