Martha Zmpounou
Biography
Martha Zmpounou is a visual artist and lecturer at the University of the Arts London, based in London. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MA in Painting from the School of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an MA in Communication Design – Illustration from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, UAL. She also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication from London College of Fashion, UAL, awarded with distinction.
Her awards include the Cass Art Award, St Cuthbert’s Mill Watercolour Prize and De Laszlo Foundation Award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been exhibited and published widely in the UK, Sweden, Germany and Greece, including exhibitions with the Royal Watercolour Society, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition and Discerning Eye.
Artist Statement
Martha Zmpounou is primarily a figurative artist exploring themes of reverie, loss and memory. Her work revolves around the human figure and portrait as spaces of expression and exposure, presenting the body as a layered, multifaceted and often fragmented entity. Working mostly on paper, she develops her paintings through multiple layers of watercolour and other water-based media, while also working on unprimed fabric and through hand-pressed watercolour monoprinting.
Zmpounou embraces the inherent qualities of water-based media, particularly their fluidity and transparency. Accidental bleeds, unfinished or seemingly underdeveloped areas sit alongside passages of meticulous detail, creating a fragile dynamic balance between abstraction and representation. She is interested in the tonal and morphological particularities of a sitter’s skin and facial characteristics, seeking to capture the transient and ambiguous elements of the figure that are often masked or hidden in portraiture.
Her work subtly undermines the glorification of an idealised, polished self as complete and coherent. Instead, she is drawn towards the incomplete and incoherent, the fragmentary and the cryptic, using these qualities to explore identity, exposure and memory.