Rebecca Gilpin is a London-based painter whose practice explores rhythm as it appears in the natural world, music, and urban life. Her oil paintings serve as records of her decision-making process, shaped by a deep sensitivity to her environment. Each canvas becomes both a journey and a portrait of an inner landscape, where colour, form, and movement collide.
Working without a predetermined outcome, Gilpin enters a flow state in the studio, often painting to music. Sound, along with memory, shifting light, reflection, and landscape, deeply inform her compositional choices and brushwork.
Gilpin’s work is rooted in a deep investigation into the materiality of oil paint. She experiments with thick and thin applications, layering and removal, and the tension between transparency and opacity. Drawing from a wide visual lineage, she reinterprets the influence of past artists into a language entirely her own.
Light plays a central role in her work, from the synthetic glow of music venues to the natural shifts of daylight, transforming colour into an emotional force. For Gilpin, colour is not just visual but energetic and emotive, capable of disrupting or harmonising a painting.
Many of her paintings are titled after songs or song lyrics that inspired them, reinforcing the ongoing interplay between sound and image. For Gilpin, painting becomes a way to process the world when language falls short. Her practice is as much about formal concerns - rhythm, depth, transparency, as it is about perception, sensation, and the experience of being.
Her paintings frequently play with perception, using layering to prompt the viewer to ask, “Which colour was applied first?” They invite close looking, drawing the eye to underpainting and traces of past gestures. To create an immersive experience, Gilpin often installs her larger works low on the wall.
Gilpin worked with PM/AM in 2022–2023 and has exhibited internationally, including at Melzi Fine Art in Milan (2024) and the Kelly-McKenna Gallery in New Jersey (2025). Her work is held in private collections globally and is on public display in spaces such as the HIV Ward at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital.
C.V.
Rebecca Gilpin
Born 1996, London, United Kingdom
University of Oxford Brookes, BA (2018)
City and Guilds School of Art, MA (2025)
Exhibitions
2025: Group Show, 'Small is Beautiful,' Flowers Gallery, London
2025: Group Show, Kelly-McKenna Gallery, New Jersey
2024: Duo Show, 'Psychological Paintings,' Melzi Fine Art, Milan
2024: Group Show, 'Lilacs Out of the Dead Land,' Donya Gallery, London
2024: Group Show, 'Rope-a-dope,' Oceans Apart Gallery, Salford, Manchester
2023: Group Show, The Bomb Factory Foundation, London
2023: Group Show, ‘Goddesses', Terrace Gallery, London
2023: Group Show,’34’, PM/AM, London
2022: Group Show, 'What Now,' PM/AM, London
2022: Group Show, 'Roam', Fitzrovia Gallery, London
2022: Solo Show, PM/AM, Soho, London
2022: Group Show, ‘Delphian Open Call Winners’ Unit 1 Gallery London
2022: Group Show, 'Inner Worlds,’ Fitzrovia Gallery, London
2022: Group Show: ‘In Awe of You,’ Liliya Art Gallery, Putney High St, London
2022: Group Show: The Bomb Factory, Marylebone Road, London
Art Fairs
2025: Pan Amsterdam, Homecoming Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Writing
2025: Turps Banana Magazine, Sarah Dwyer Interview, Issue 30
2022: Turps Banana Magazine, Mary Heilmann Interview, Issue 26
Donations
2025: Painting donation to the radiotherapy unit, Royal Marsden Hospital, Sutton
2019: Painting donation to the HIV ward, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London
Public Art Award
2024: Shortlisted for Fortnum & Mason Hoarding Instillation
2025: Canal Boat Contemporary Open Call