Atalanta Xanthe (b. 1996, UK) grew up in the UK and New Mexico, USA, and now lives and works in London. Xanthe studied at the undergraduate level at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2014-2016) and completed her Postgraduate MFA at the New York Academy of Art (2016-2018). On graduating, at 21, she became the New York Academy of Art’s youngest Fellow (2018-2019). Xanthe’s is a world of fantastical surrealism - a beguiling collision of nature and artifice. Her painterly dramas, tantalisingly ambiguous, are a space for free-wheeling and re- imagining. Xanthe is influenced by stagecraft and the world of theatre; mischievously splicing aspects of her own biography with elements of the art historical canon and popular culture to create plots which are permeable, stretchy and, at times, magnificently unhinged. A practice rooted in drawing, Xanthe teases out her compositions and narratives over the course of many preliminary studies before embarking on the final painting. Knowingly riffing on the scale and seriality of history paintings, a genre traditionally depicting male heroism or grand events, Xanthe’s ability to vault, jump headlong, sprint or glide effortlessly across the canvas is testament to her love of paint and the purist act of applying pigment to canvas in the name of storytelling. Xanthe’s singular stylistic flair and clearly identifiable hand constitute a feminist reclamation of narrative through paint.
Her work has been exhibited extensively internationally in the UK, USA, Italy, France and Germany. Notable solo exhibitions include: Age Gap: 1494-2024, Alice Black Gallery, London, UK (2024); Uteroverse, Alice Black Gallery, London, UK (2022); and Scaffold for the Imagination, Galleria Alessandro Albanese, Milan, Italy (2023). In 2024, Xanthe participated in the GIRLPOWER Residency in southwestern France. Xanthe was also the recipient of the prestigious Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait
Competition in 2013 and the David Schafer Portrait Award in 2017. Xanthe is featured in the permanent collections of the Ruth Borchard Collection, UK and the Marval Collection, Italy.