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Mahalia, Rising Star places a contemporary Black British vocalist at the centre of a visual language historically complicit in marginalisation. Drawing on Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics while actively interrupting their gaze, the painting confronts questions of mastery, presence, and cultural memory.
Created in resistance to spectacle, speed, and aesthetic flattening, this work insists on discipline, subjecthood, and the dignity of becoming. It asks the viewer not to consume, but to remain.