About Helena Cardow

Helena Cardow is a figurative artist living and working in London, UK. She read MA Visual Arts and Culture, and BA Sociology at Durham University, and began exploring her artistic practice after graduating.

Her work is multimedia-based; spanning collage, photography, illustration, and primarily, oil painting. She tends to paint figuratively, and lately has been focusing on portraits of women and smaller anatomical studies. Thematically, her art is concerned with the depiction of bodies in spaces which are actively created by a partial eye, and how these compositions and biases affect the meaning of the overall image.

As an artist of mixed heritage, she wants to increase diversity in the arts, to paint subjects who have historically been overlooked in Western art. She is also heavily influenced by her academic background, delving into sociological topics such as the intersectional relationships between conceptions of race, feminism, gender and sexuality - revealing subjects whilst simultaneously encouraging the viewer to question the power dynamics inherent in the act of ‘looking’.

Helena Cardow’s CV