New voices in contemporary art

New Voices, the first collaborative group show between Crème Fraîche and an established gallery, marks a major milestone for both the programme and the exhibiting artists. It is particularly pleasing that the invitation to exhibit comes from Rebecca Hossack, who established her eponymous gallery in Fitzrovia in 1988. Rebecca has long eschewed trends in favour of artists she considers innovative, exciting, and (for want of a better word) good. She introduced Aboriginal art to London long before it became a fixture on the gallery and institutional circuit and gave Emily Kam Kngwarray her first solo presentation, decades before her recent show at Tate Modern. Crème Fraîche shares Rebecca’s vision of a gallery that prioritises artists over artworks.

The exhibition celebrates the boldness, skill, and imagination of a new generation of painters while placing them in dialogue with the vision of a gallery that has long championed innovation and risk-taking. New Voices presents five painters from Crème Fraîche’s current second year. Guanyi Chen transforms Chinese calligraphy, religious traditions, and board games into intricate, visually rigorous explorations of systems, ritual, and repetition. Ella Trott continues to interrogate memory and personal history, now in a vibrant new palette that turns intimate family snapshots into cinematic moments. Grace McNerney examines the tension between desire and devotion through the 1947 film Black Narcissus and adult magazines. Marium M. Habib uses large-scale, vividly coloured narratives to confront sex, power, and orientalism with humour and critical insight. Isidore Bishop-Sauve extends his investigation of longing, memory, and fragments through assemblage and oil painting, exploring the tension between the known and the possible.

Between their varied approaches, New Voices offers a glimpse of painting’s next chapter, presenting these five artists at an exciting and formative point in their careers.