5 Artists on Our Radar in January 2024

Rachel Lancaster’s paintings capture the elusive and often overlooked moments of everyday life. With a keen eye for detail and a penchant for the mundane, Lancaster elevates ordinary scenes into enticing, memory-like narratives. Her approach involves extracting and reinterpreting “stills” from various moving images and personal photos. These fragments range from domestic interiors to close-ups of inanimate objects and people—rendered with an ethereal soft focus.

Her technique involves meticulously layering thin glazes of oil paint to create textures that converge, resulting in blurred edges. This pull of the figurative toward the abstract is a hallmark of her work, exemplified by her first solo exhibition at WORKPLACE, “In The Wake,” which is on view in London until January 10th. The artist also made an impression as part of WORKPLACE’s group presentation at NADA in Miami last month.

Lancaster earned her MFA in fine art at Newcastle University in 2011. Since then, she has exhibited in group shows hosted at WORKPLACE, which represents her, as well as Elysium Gallery and Newcastle Contemporary Art.

—Maxwell Rabb