ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2025
WINNERS GROUP EXHIBITION
The VAA Artist of the Year Awards presents a spectacular online showcase celebrating the exceptional talent of this year’s winners. Each artist demonstrates remarkable creativity, vision, and skill, offering a vivid insight into the vitality of contemporary art today.
Since its founding, the Awards have supported both emerging and established artists from around the globe, providing opportunities for recognition and career‑defining exposure. The 2025 competition highlights the diversity, ambition, and innovation that define the work of these extraordinary practitioners.
Exhibiting Artists:
Cara Roberts, Best New & Emerging Artist; Jane Palm-Gold, Landscape Category Winner; Trevor Burgess, Best International Artist; Kristine Nason, Best Professional & Established Artist; Lőrincz Krisztina, Still Life & Wildlife Category Winner, and Clare Hanna, People’s Choice Winner.
The majority of the artworks on display in the exhibition are for sale. For purchase enquiries, please email hello@visual-artists.org.
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VIEW THE EXHIBITION
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Category Winners
Cara Roberts
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Best New & Emerging Artist
'My practice is rooted in the belief that every face carries a narrative worthy of being seen, valued, and understood. Through hyperrealistic portraiture, I investigate the human face not simply as a record of likeness, but as a powerful site of identity, emotion, and social meaning. Each portrait becomes a quiet encounter—an invitation to slow down and truly look.
Living with vitiligo has profoundly shaped my perspective. My experience of visible difference informs both my subject matter and my approach, allowing me to examine how beauty standards are formed, reinforced, and ultimately challenged. I am interested in how society assigns value to appearance, and how those judgments affect visibility, belonging, and self-worth. Rather than concealing difference, my work positions it as a source of strength, agency, and beauty.
By portraying individuals whose features resist conventional expectations, I celebrate individuality while confronting the stigma often attached to physical difference. These works exist at the intersection of the personal and the political. They ask the viewer to question ingrained assumptions, to look beyond surface judgments, and to recognise the dignity, complexity, and humanity present in every face.
Working primarily in watercolour, I focus on subtle tonal shifts, textures, and emotional nuance. The delicacy of the medium mirrors both the fragility and resilience of identity. I avoid idealisation, instead seeking honesty—capturing overlooked details that speak to lived experience and inner life.
Ultimately, my work aims to shift perception, advocating for a more inclusive understanding of beauty and contributing to an ongoing cultural reimagining of how we see ourselves and one another.'
View more of Cara's work:
Jane Palm-Gold
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Landscape Category Winner
The history of St Giles in London’s West End is multifaceted, dense and deep - it’s been the inspiration for my body of work for 20 years. On coming here, I became gripped by the ‘sense of place’ and embarked upon an intense period of research to bring important, yet forgotten London history to life. I observed and drew urban contemporary West End life from my window to fuse the past with the present.
My materials are pencils, ink and gouache which form the underlying layer of a work, overlain by mixed media textures to form painted collages. These are created from fine papers, scraps of printed magazines and water media experiments in acrylics mark-making. My influences span 18th century artists and social commentators, John Thomas Smith and Hogarth, to the writings of Henry Mayhew and Dickens. Yet my recent work presents local 20th century history: the life of Derek Jarman at Phoenix House, Charing Cross Road and his transition to the ‘Fifth Continent’ at Dungeness. These paintings were all inspired by Jarman’s diary entries from Smiling in Slow Motion and Modern Nature. In my work, The Dungenesser, I endeavoured to capture his moving description of gardens and gardeners existing in another time, without past or future, beginning or end.
Studying Jarman’s nature writings have brought into focus my long existent love and connection to the land. I am currently working on some autobiographical paintings, fusing my experiences in the landscape with ancient sense of place, spirituality and wellbeing.
View more of Jane Palm Gold's work:
www.instagram.com/janepalmgoldart
www.instagram.com/janepalmgold
janepalmgold.com
Trevor Burgess
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Best International Artist
These paintings are from the “Stacks and Wrap-ups” series of large canvases. They emerged out of paintings I have made of markets around the world, drawing on trips in Latin America, Europe, India and Morocco. They depict a series of enigmatic sculptural objects, dominating the canvas, radiating mystery.
The idea for the pictures came to me in the central market of the remote Argentinian town of San Juan. In one section of the market were a series of piled up stacks of market goods and paraphernalia that evoked a warehouse art installation of large-scale sculptures. The bound-up, mysterious objects evoked powerful forces of production and consumption, distribution and waste. In that moment I began to imagine this series of paintings and to look out for similar experiences on my travels in streets and markets after hours. It may be no coincidence that these objects exerted a fascination for me during a period in which the world has been experiencing a series of shocks – the pandemic, wars, tariffs – that have powerfully disrupted markets and trading systems.
The title of the series “Stacks and Wrap-ups” connects the paintings with an aesthetic lineage – minimalism, Christo and Jeanne Claude’s wrapped objects, sculptural concepts of the found object, assemblage and installation art. Others present large fields of colour. In each case, these objects, dominating and blocking the view at the centre of the paintings, confront the spectator with the paradox that what is hidden can provoke the imagination more than what is seen.
The Stacks and Wrap-ups will be launched in a solo exhibition at South Quay Gallery and Learning Centre, Great Yarmouth, opening on 1 May 2026. https://southquaygallery.com/
View more of Trevor Burgess' work:
Krisztina Lőrincz
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Still Life Category Winner
Krisztina Lőrincz was born in Budapest, Hungary. She studied several instruments and graduated from the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest. She pursued studies in theology and mental health, played in orchestras for many years, and in the meantime, persistently drew and copied the works of great masters.
Since the autumn of 2016, Krisztina Lőrincz has been attending the Zsilip Art School, where she found an inspiring art teacher in Kálmán Gasztonyi. In his courses, she learned the fundamentals of acrylic and oil painting, and since then, she has continued to develop and learn alongside him.
Her studies in theology and mental health have deepened in her a desire for constant self-development and for the discovery and admiration of humanity, life, and the universe. In her painting, she portrays feelings experienced or imagined in her thoughts and surroundings.
There is no subject that has not been painted, but what inspires Krisztina Lőrincz to create again and again is the knowledge that each person is unique and special. Each artist can express their own singular being and emotions, giving themselves and others a meaningful gift.
View more of Krisztina Lőrincz's work:
www.instagram.com/krisztinart_lorincz
www.krisztinalorincz.hu
Kristine Nason
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 Best Professional & Established Artist
My artistic journey has always been shaped by a deep connection to place and story. While my early years were defined by equestrian subjects, my current practice is rooted in the vibrant life and layered histories of Ghana—my husband’s homeland and our family’s home in coastal Accra.
Living between cultures, I am drawn to document the beauty, resilience, and complexity of Ghanaian communities. My recent work explores the rhythm of daily life through expressive mark- making, textured surfaces, and a palette inspired by the country’s warmth. I’m particularly interested in what is felt but often unseen: silent stories, communal strength, and the quiet dignity of those navigating the legacies of colonialism and environmental injustice.
Working primarily in oils, I layer textures and marks to evoke memory, atmosphere, and narrative, balancing the precision of my design background with the emotional immediacy of painting. My process is intuitive and experimental, blending tradition and innovation as I explore identity, belonging, and cultural memory.
Recent recognition—including the VAA Professional & Established Artist of the Year 2025 and British Art Prize 2023 Highly Commended Finalist—affirms my commitment to pushing the boundaries of my practice. Ultimately, my work is a dialogue between past and present, inviting viewers to look closer and discover their own meaning within the layers.
View more of Kristine Nason's' work:
Clare Hanna
VAA Artist of the Year 2025 People’s Choice Award
As a painter from the North of Ireland, I draw my inspiration from the rich natural beauty of my surroundings. The majestic Mourne Mountains and the rugged coastline of the North of Ireland deeply influence my expressive, colourful artworks. My work captures the energy and essence of these landscapes, translating them into vibrant, emotive pieces that offer viewers a sense of connection to nature.
My painting style is bold, with an emphasis on texture and movement, creating dynamic compositions that make a statement in any interior. Each piece I create is a reflection of the ever-changing moods of the Northern Irish landscape, filled with life and colour. Whether through the dramatic hues of a mountain range or the serene blues of the coast, I aim to evoke emotion and invite contemplation.
With each brushstroke, I strive to convey not just what I see, but the feeling and atmosphere of these extraordinary places. My work brings the wild beauty of the north of Ireland indoors, making it a captivating focal point for collectors and art lovers alike.
View more of Clare Hanna's work: