b.1972, South Africa, lives and works in London.

Lara Feldman

Her work encompasses portraits, figurative work, still life, and landscape ciphers, focusing on image and memory, with a strong foundation in colour. Since relocating to London in 2018, Feldman has further developed her practice through the UAL Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at City Lit, from which she graduated in 2022.

Lara Feldman’s visual language adapts to her sources of inspiration, prominently referencing her native city of Cape Town, South Africa. Feldman captures figures and their landscapes through scenes rendered in vivid colours, primarily using oil on canvas. A recurring theme in her work is the depiction of Cape Town’s soft light and palm trees, symbolising her nostalgic longing for the city that shaped her.

Through gestural oil paintings, Feldman reinterprets images from her collection of personal photographs, while also capturing and interpreting moments from her life, both real and imagined, with friends and strangers serving as muses. Her figurative representations often appear softened by memory, with colours melding into one another. 

Feldman’s exploratory approach to painting focuses on the personal as a lens through which she questions her connection to her subjects. Her mastery of the medium is evident in the construction and composition of images, utilizing abstraction to edit ‘reality’, as well as her thoughtful arrangement of surfaces and painterly effects.