Rafaela de Ascanio Spain

Rafaela de Ascanio is a British and Spanish-Canarian artist working across painting and sculpture. She creates immersive installations of wallpaper, ceramics and oil paintings to position the female figure at centre stage. Her practice bridges ancient societies, when women were revered as gods, priestesses, and queens, with the complex, politicised realities of womanhood today. Through this dialogue, she builds a visual lineage that connects sacred archetypes with contemporary representations of women.

Materiality and craft are central to her process. Working with clay through the slow, manual rhythm of coil building, she engages with a grounded and tactile process. This act of making connects with the ancestral gestures of creation and labour, revaluing this historically feminine space as a site of agency and embodied knowledge. In the studio, women pose for paintings on clay and canvas. Here, conversations about their lived experiences open a space of shared reflection, and seep into the visual narrative.

In 2026, de Ascanio was awarded the CAN Art Fair Residency Award, and has been shortlisted for the Sky Arts Portrait Award and the Women in Art Prize (TBD). This same year she had a solo exhibition at Sketch in London and is currently at Ceramica Suro Residency in Guadalajara, Mexico. De Ascanio studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s,

earned a BA in History of Art and a Masters Degree in Curating under Martin Caiger-Smith both at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and later returned to painting at Turps Banana School, London. She lives and works between Madrid and London.