Nicola Bealing
b. 1963, United Kingdom
Nicola Bealing is a painter and printmaker based in Cornwall. She studied at Hertfordshire College of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art, London. Her work is figurative, anchored strongly in narrative, laced with dark humour and pulsing with surreal unease.
Recent exhibitions include the John Moore’s Prize for Painting, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2021); ‘3 Acts and 7 Scenes’ Salisbury Arts Centre(2020); ‘Bugs – Beauty and Danger’ Groundwork Gallery, King’s Lynn, Norfolk(2020); ’Bodies in Space, Mirror, Plymouth(2021); ‘Body and Soul’ RWA Bristol(2019);‘Mariner’ Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, The Edge / Andrew Brownsword Gallery, Bath(2019/20); ‘Where it is, there it is’ Auction House Project Space, Redruth, Cornwall(2018); ‘Capital Crime’ Matts Gallery, London(2018); ’The Art of Rivalry’OSR Projects, Somerset(2018); ‘Mono’, Kestle Barton, Cornwall(2019); ‘Strange Worlds : The Visions of Angela Carter’, RWA, Bristol(2016); ‘The White Hotel’, Gimpel Fils, London(2014).
In 2015 she received Arts Council funding to research and respond to the archives of Helston Museum in Cornwall, resulting in a body of work based on the narratives within historical documents and shown as ‘Death and Circuses’ at Kestle Barton in 2016. She continued the process of historical enquiry with a project investigating the extensive archives of the Foundling Museum in London. The work developed into ‘A New Song (To An Old Tune)’, shown alongside ‘Hogarth and the Art of Noise’ at the Foundling Museum in 2019. She recently completed two major installations with the mental health charity Hospital Rooms, and undertook a residency at Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico. She was a recipient of the Bryan Robertson Trust Award in 2021.
Her work is held in the British Museum permanent collection of prints and drawings, The Foundling Museum, The Unilever Collection and The Jerwood Contemporary Collection amongst many others.