Sikelela Owen RA Elect (b. 1984)

Sikelela Owen was born in 1984, in London she lives and works in Essex and London. She received her BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (2006) and holds a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2012).

Ideas of community, intimacy, and authenticity are central to Sikelela Owen’s practice. Drawing from early modern paintings of the 19th century, personal references, broader imagery, and narratives, Owen creates loose, layered figurative paintings that foreground the subjects and communities comprising her lived experience and memories of growing up with family in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and America.

Through undefined landscapes, visible underpainting, muted tones, and incomplete descriptions, the looseness of oil paint perfectly mimics the fluidity needed to describe these spaces and the connections formed across them every day.

Owen’s work was featured in the 2015 Thames and Hudson publication ‘100 Painters of Tomorrow’. In 2019 Owen was an Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome and Elephant Lab in London. In 2022 Owen was awarded the Sunny Dupree Award for a Woman Artist.

Recent Solo exhibitions include the Air is heavy with Love, Taymour Grahne Projects (2023), Sikelela Owen, James Freeman Gallery (2020, 2021) and Supper, sleep and sorrow, LdM, University Gallery, Florence (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024), Finding Family, The Foundling Museum, London (2022), Tronies, Christina Koning, Vienna (2022). Included in the Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022), Gillian Jason Gallery (2022) and John Moores Painting Prize Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2021).

Owen is a lecturer at Camberwell College of Art and Design on the Painting Course.