Martha Zmpounou

Martha Zmpounou is a visual artist based in London. In her work she blends different techniques and media, working mainly with watercolour, ink, acrylic and collage. Using portraiture and the human figure as a territory for exploration, her works appear fluid, fragmented, half complete even grotesque, balancing between beauty and repulsion. Drawing from the fashion and pop culture, covering, masking and layering are deployed to create figures and faces whose identities emerge out of a play of hiding and revealing. It is an instinctive process of working where destruction is seen as a means to create. It often involves reworking and painting over previous drawings, cutting and reassembling sketches, fragments of paintings and found imagery. These are combined, modified and rearranged creating figures, assemblages with their parts disparate and at once connected.