Alexandra Baraitser (b. Cape Town, South Africa)
Based between Cambridge and London, Alexandra Baraitser is a painter whose work elevates the quiet dramaturgy of everyday objects. Her subjects, chairs, lamps, living-room furniture, bridges, office buildings and train-station seating, are contemporary still lifes of intensely designed forms. Through saturated colour and elegantly flattened space, Baraitser frees these objects from their functional constraints, transporting them into states of subtle unreality.
Though she works from closely observed photographs, her paintings reside on the edge of abstraction. Their atmosphere is liminal, suggestive of memory, emotion and the thresholds of lived experience. Figures occasionally appear, loose and ambiguous, slipping into this heightened domestic or architectural stage.
Baraitser has exhibited widely, including at Flowers Gallery (Small Is Beautiful), the Soho Open at GPS Gallery (2025), and the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition (2024–2025). She won the People’s Choice Award and was Highly Commended for the Young Masters Women’s Art Award (2025). Earlier recognition includes The Cambridge Show at Kettle’s Yard (2019), a British Council Award for a residency at Design Tasmania (2005), and the prestigious Abbey Scholarship in Painting at The British School at Rome (1996–97). She has also been shortlisted for The Mostyn Open and The Momart Fellowship (1999), exhibited at the Barbican Centre Galleries (1996), and was a finalist in the NatWest Art Prize (1998) and John Moores Painting Prize (1996). Additional honours include the Ray Finnis Trust Art Funding Award, the Florence Trust Studio Award, a Commissions East Award for mentoring with Rachel Thomas (Hayward Gallery), and a COVID-19 Emergency Funding Award (2020).
Her work has been featured in Bouyant Art, The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, The Arts Desk, and resides in collections including Clare Hall (University of Cambridge), Design Tasmania, J Sainsbury PLC, and several private collections.