Vanessa Raw

Georgina Pounds Gallery opens with Monsters Paradise: The Becoming of Her Divine Beast, the first solo exhibition in Mexico and Latin America by Vanessa Raw. Opening on February 4, 2026, Raw’s large-scale paintings are symbolically layered, emotionally vulnerable and fiercely dreamlike. Her expansive canvases depict intimate female figures within lush, imaginary landscapes that shift between the mythological and the psychological. Monsters Paradise: The Becoming of her Divine Beast, draws inspiration from Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous- Feminine, reimagining what Creed described as ‘that which unsettles boundaries,’ not horrifying but transformational. Raw’s paintings take this idea into a poetic space, blending classical imagery with the aura of feminine deities, showing women in contemplation in nature. And So It Is, 2025 features a female figure holding a goldfinch, a gesture that evokes Eve and introduces themes of joy, hope, knowledge, temptation, and spiritual return. The Dark Days Are Over, 2025, suggests an inner Eden through its landscape, trembling between ruin and renewal, where memory, emotion, and the divine intertwine.

Presented in an historic 1911 building in Colonia Roma Norte, the exhibition speaks intimately with the architecture of the space. High ceilings, delicate mouldings and light filtering through the rooms generate a warm atmosphere that amplifies the luminous quality of Raw’s paintings; a modern harmony with baroque accents. In these rooms, the memory, myth and spirit of artists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo continue to resonate.

Conceived and developed in partnership with Carl Freedman Gallery, this exhibition forms part of an ongoing series of projects realised through reciprocal collaborations with established international galleries, fostering exchange between international artists and Mexico City’s contemporary art scene. Vanessa Raw is a British painter whose work weaves together intimacy, mythology and the natural world. Her paintings draw on Greek and Mexican myth, depicting women and animals in enchanted landscapes that feel both ancient and otherworldly. Figures often merge with the land itself, surrounded by symbolic fauna and flora that carry layered meanings.

Raw most recently received the The Arts Council Collection Frieze Acquisitions Fund in 2025. In 2024, she held her first institutional exhibition, This is How the Light Gets In at the Rubell Museum, Miami, alongside her first major solo show, On Earth We Weren’t Meant to Stay, at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, where she is currently represented. In 2023, she was nominated by Tracey Emin for a solo exhibition as part of Frieze London’s Artist-to-Artist section. Raw earned a BA in Fine Art from Loughborough University and, in 2022, was selected for a studio at TKE Studios. She currently lives and works in Margate, England.

— Galería Georgina Pounds