b. 1990 in Suffolk, UK

In her large-scale paintings, Ania Hobson renders portraits that exaggerate and reinterpret the features of her sitters to scrutinize standards of beauty and the gender expectations that guide societal perceptions. Hobson’s portraits are often of women and present a number of visual clues that give hint to a narrative. She assigns individual personalities to the figures as candid expressions of modern femininity. There is an overarching tone of intimacy and familiarity at times between these subjects, a representation of the closeness Hobson feels to her sitters who are often members of her family. She is painterly and directorial in her application of varying viewpoints for her compositions that are at times very low or high to produce a monumental effect. And yet, disrupting this carefully curated veneer of painterly qualities are the figures themselves that exhibit illustrative qualities in their shading and linework. The paintings resemble rectangular panels that have been ripped from a comic, an impression that is substantiated by their content which presents the figures in everyday situations as they interact with each other or with the world around them. Hobson combines the techniques of multiple disciplines with critical art, social, and gender theory which results in works that inform, and are informed by, the present-day zeitgeist in the arts and beyond.

Ania Hobson lives and works in Suffolk, UK, having graduated from the University Suffolk before continuing her studies at the Royal Drawing School in London and the Florence Academy of Art. In 2017, she was awarded the Young Artist Award of the BP Portrait Awards, granted by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Hobson has been featured in solo and group shows including Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2022. She has also been presented in the Scope Art Show at the MET Pavilion in 2020, by the National Portrait Gallery and the GAA Foundation at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2018.