Alexandra Baraitser | YU Xiao

Tiderip x Mandy Zhang Art
 
She Paints Still is a dual-venue exhibition initiated by two London-based female gallerists, inviting audiences into the ongoing worlds of two female artists. Presented simultaneously at Tiderip and Mandy Zhang Art, the exhibition brings together works by Alexandra Baraitser and YU Xiao from different series and periods, highlighting both their conceptual and medium divergences while staging a dialogue across spaces.
 
At Tiderip, Baraitser’s early paintings revisit classic design and interior spaces, revealing her meticulous reconstructions of design objects and her ordered approach to their representation. In dialogue, YU Xiao’s Da Vinci Mirror series is a quiet excavation of perception, perspective, and the fragile crossroads of reality and abstraction, tangled, too, with Helene Cixous’s écriture féminine. It lingers in the fluidity of representation: images that refuse to fix, shifting like thought itself, all to trace the unspoken currents of female experience.
 
Mandy Zhang Art presents Baraitser’s more recent works, in which her focus shifts from individual design objects to modernist spaces as a whole such as hotel lobbies, courtyards, and architectural façades, capturing a detached yet introspective perspective. YU Xiao’s Utopian Blink series, by contrast, orbits the notion of the "non-place". A realm of potential beyond tangible reality, where "blink" acts as both a lens and a spark: a primal, curious way of seeing that jolts attention awake. 
 
Through this interwoven arrangement of spaces and series, She Paints Still invites audiences to consider how female artistic practice endures through persistence in the face of cultural and structural challenges, the multiplicity of cross-cultural identities, and the temporal flows embedded in artistic production. The exhibition challenges the idea of interruption, showing how female artists sustain painting as a vital and enduring form of expression amid shifting lives and cultural contexts.




Featuring Artists

Alexandra Baraitser (b. 1971, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in
Cambridge and London, U.K. She recently was joint winner of The People's
Choice Award and was Highly Commended for the Young Masters Woman’s Art Award at the Young Masters Art Prize (2025), and has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition (2025, 2024) and Kettle’s Yard (2019). Earlier awards include the Abbey Scholarship in Painting at the British School at Rome (1996–97), the NatWest Art Prize finalist (1998), and exhibitions at the Barbican Centre Galleries (1996) and the John Moores Painting Prize (1996).
Her paintings draw on 20th-century modernist design, the Bauhaus movement, and 1950s interiors. Using magazine clippings and photography as sources, she builds images on a white ground with thin layers of oil paint, creating glossy, translucent surfaces. While rooted in figuration, her work has gradually shifted from photorealism toward abstraction, emphasising light, shade, and fluid brushwork.
 
YU Xiao is a London-based artist with over ten years of experience in painting. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2010, after which she became a full-time artist collaborating with multiple galleries and institutions. Over the years, her work has been exhibited in institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the He Xiangning Art Museum, and she has also participated in major art fairs such as Art Basel, KIAF, and West Bund. In addition to her artistic practice, YU Xiao teaches at universities and is currently in the final year of her practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art.