GUTS GALLERY: Championed Artists

SøEdited Team:
SøCreative Director: Chris Saint Sims ​

​Championing instead of representing: Artists deserve to be at the centre of the art world. Each of our artists’ work is informed by their backgrounds, and they each have their own powerful voice. Guts Gallery was founded to ensure that artists from underrepresented backgrounds could have their voices heard, so instead of ‘representing’ them, we champion them, vigorously supporting their development and causes.

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Sophie Vallance Cantor

Cantor creates worlds that express the inner workings of her mind by blurring the line between reality and imagination. Her paintings invite viewers to see the world through her eyes: where bright neon signs light up dark alleyways and domestic cats transform into wild beasts in 24-hour bars and cafés. ​

​Amidst the narrative of her paintings there often lies a sense of stillness. Each small moment is immortalised and savoured through thick, luscious strokes of oil paint that exude a palpable sense of joy and pleasure in the creation process.

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​Shadi Al-Atallah

Al-Atallah creates large-scale figurative paintings. The dark and dynamic figures depicted in the mixed-media works are distorted self-portraits. Drawing connections between the Queer ballroom scene and folkloric dance traditions from the African diaspora, Al-Atallah explores ideas of performativity, spirituality and catharsis. 
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Working in rapid motion, Al-Atallah paints fast to avoid their thoughts slipping and each painting documents a single hazy moment in time, examining the space between the mundane and the spiritual.

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​Olivia Sterling

Sterling has carved out a distinctive niche in using paint to address questions of blackness and whiteness in twenty-first century Britain. Her paintings present scenes of colourful mayhem with a nostalgic twist and signature ‘slapstick’ style, combining joyous celebration with a subtle critique of racialised ways of seeing.
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Blending pointed references like this into her depiction of ordinary scenes and subjects, Sterling’s work reflects on how we are confronted by racialised discourse everywhere in the everyday. Even happy or anodyne spaces are encoded with structures of othering and difference; every object, every skin tone, is assigned its place in a drama that continues beyond the edges of the canvas.

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​Elsa Rouy

Elsa Rouy creates images of intense psychological depth. Rouy describes her work as “a visual portrayal of abstruse emotions.” Through painting, Rouy attempts to get to the heart of her own personal experience as a woman.

For Rouy, bodies are in a constant state of ‘becoming,’ they are never static or inert, instead, they are a site of process and flux. By stressing the parts of the body that represent the osmosis between the exterior, outside world and the interior, bodily world. Rouy creates a world in which the strict delineation between different bodies is wiped away and effaced.