ABOUT
Ruby Read's paintings begin with looking. Often starting from quick drawings, she works in oil, mostly straight from the tube. She builds, scrapes and reworks the surface with a palette knife and usually a single brush. Her strokes are loaded, intuitive and directional, and every one stays visible. Some areas are built up thickly and others are left untouched, giving the paint a luscious "icing-like" surface, with colour turned up past natural.
At the heart of the work are faces: people close to her, often herself, and sometimes whole groups. Read is drawn to things that are "alluring", "overripe" and "bodily", and to the details other people walk past, like the way someone carries their weight, the furrow of a brow or a habitual tilt of the head. She is curious about caricature and how far a likeness can be pushed before it stops being that person. Through her mark-making she exaggerates colour and form, stretching a nose or a jaw just a little further than life. For Read, this kind of distortion is a form of devotion, a way of loving someone's particulars out loud.
Ruby lives and works between London and Shropshire. She graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with a BA in Fine Art Painting, then completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2025. After the MA she was selected for Tracey Emin's Victoria House Residency in Margate, and this winter (2026) she is in residence at Duplex in Lisbon.
Her work has been held in the Travers Smith Collection and the Pilgrm Hotel collection, and is featured in the Rise Art collection.
You can buy original oil paintings directly through this website. Ruby considers commissions on a case-by-case basis. To enquire, email ruby@rubyread.art.
CV
Born
2002 Shrewsbury, Shropshire.
Education
2025 MA Fine Art Painting, The Royal College of Art, London.
2024 First Class Honours, BA Fine Art Painting, University of the Arts, London.
2021 A levels: Fine Art (A*), Design (A*) and Economics.
Residencies
2026 Duplex, Lisbon, Portugal
2026 Tracey Emin, Victoria House Residency, Margate
Solo Shows
2025 Natural Selection, The Gallery, Shrewsbury
Group Shows
2026 The Graduate Art Show, Art Movement Gallery, Battersea, London
2026 Off Season, Margate
2025 An Other Space, IBV Vaults, Park Lane London
2025 Past Meets Present, 15 Bateman Street, Soho, London
2024 Bunny Contemporary, Shoreditch, London
2024 Infinite Possibilities, The Gallery, Earls Court, London
2024 En Route, Southwark Park Galleries, London
2023 Sound and Vision, The Bomb Factory, Marylebone, London
2023 Refraction, Bargehouse OXO Tower, London
2022 Reflection, Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, Shrewsbury
2022 Parenthesis, Copeland Gallery, London
Collections
Travers Smith Collection
Rise Art Collection
Pilgrm Hotel Collection
