Cristina Schek's artwork Bubbles, The Fish (2025), from her Waterline Dreams series, illustrates the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Director’s Circle News feature celebrating Line of Beauty, the Young Masters People’s Choice Award Winners Exhibition at The Exhibitionist Hotel in South Kensington, just a five-minute walk from the museum.
The exhibition, presented by the not-for-profit Young Masters Art Prize in collaboration with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, brings together the work of Cristina Schek, First Prize winner of the 2025 Young Masters People’s Choice Award, and Alexandra Baraitser, Second Prize winner.
A Transylvanian-born, London-based artist, Cristina Schek creates conceptual photographic works that explore identity, illusion and the possibilities of the constructed image. Working with her own photographic archive, Schek layers and reassembles images into new visual realities, drawing inspiration from literature, cinema, art history and the surreal. Her featured artwork, Bubbles, The Fish (2025), from the Waterline Dreams series, brings together the human figure and an imagined underwater world. With its vivid colours, theatrical composition and dreamlike imagery, the work invites viewers to look beyond appearances and question the boundaries between reality and imagination. Its inclusion in V&A Director’s Circle News brings Schek's distinctive visual language to an audience of museum patrons and supporters.
Line of Beauty: Young Masters at The Exhibitionist Hotel
Presented at The Exhibitionist Hotel in South Kensington, Line of Beauty celebrates two contemporary artists whose work approaches the transformation of reality through different visual languages. Cristina Schek's photographic surrealism enters into dialogue with Alexandra Baraitser's paintings of interiors and everyday objects, creating an exhibition that explores perception, transformation and the imaginative possibilities of familiar spaces. Installed throughout the hotel's Georgian interiors, the exhibition offers an alternative to the traditional gallery experience, allowing contemporary artworks to become part of an intimate architectural setting.
The exhibition runs from 15 January to 12 June 2026.
Featured in V&A Director’s Circle News
The inclusion of Line of Beauty in the Victoria and Albert Museum Patrons’ Director’s Circle News, illustrated with Cristina Schek's Bubbles, The Fish, represents a valuable moment of visibility for the artist and the Young Masters programme. The feature introduces the exhibition to the V&A's patron community, bringing attention to contemporary practices that engage with art history while developing distinctive new forms of expression.
