About

Margot Blackk is a contemporary abstract artist based in London, UK.

My paintings explore how perception and identity are formed through accumulation, pressure, and encounter. Rather than translating personal experience into narrative, I work through colour, density, gesture, and surface disruption to construct pictorial fields in which instability becomes materially present.

Working primarily with oil, I build layered surfaces in which opacity, weight, and movement register the effects of time, contact, and internal change. A painting begins with my decisions, but those decisions do not remain entirely mine once they enter the work. Existing layers, viscosity, drying, density, colour and previous marks become conditions that affect what can happen next. Their effects, in turn, become new conditions, allowing the painting to develop a logic that may diverge from my own.

Displacement is central to my practice, not as a fixed biographical subject, but as an ongoing condition of becoming. It occurs when different conditions encounter, shift and alter one another, appearing through blockage, accumulation, partial exposure, concealment and pictorial tension. These are not resolved into symbols or narratives, but remain active within the material and spatial logic of the painting.

I understand painting not simply as an image, but as an entity in formation: something I initiate but cannot fully control, possess or resolve. The artist is one factor among others participating in its formation. Although a painting emerges through these factors and their relations, it cannot be reduced to their sum. Its autonomy lies partly in this irreducibility—in the fact that what formed it does not entirely account for what it has become.

Even when a surface is opened, scratched, layered, blocked or interrupted, it does not necessarily disclose itself. Exposure can produce further concealment; an interruption can generate another condition; a trace can become the basis for what follows. The painting remains partially withdrawn from any singular reading while asserting its own particular presence.

My practice begins from displacement but moves towards painting itself: its autonomy, opacity and unstable becoming. Identity is not represented as a stable subject but transposed into the condition of painting—formed through encounter, altered through relation, and never fully exhausted by what can be known about it.

Education

2026 MA, Painting, Royal College of Art, London, UK

2024 (Honours) Bachelor of Fine Arts, Drawing & Painting, OCAD University, Toronto, On, Canada

Solo Exhibitions

2024 Please, Black!, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

2023 Adversity to Contemplation, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

Group Exhibitions

2026 Yesterday Was November 18, Tomorrow Will Be Too, Hypha Studios, London, UK

2026 173rd Annual Open Exhibition, Royal West of England Academy (RWA), Bristol, UK

2023 “Iridescence”, Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto, On

2022 “Abstraction”, 100 McCaul st, Toronto, On