5 Brewer Street
Oxford
OX1 1QN
The 2025 Emery Prize winner is...
K.B. Clear
On view in Trinity Term 2027
About the Emery Prize
The Emery Prize is an annual prize award to a Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, BFA or MFA finalist student. The inaugural prize was awarded in 2018 and has continued each year, to support emerging artists within the Oxford University community and to encourage engagement with contemporary art in the wider Oxford community. Named after the founder of the Pembroke College JCR Art Collection, The Emery Prize reinvents the collection’s historic links to the Ruskin School of Art, by finding new ways to support contemporary art practice through providing a platform for exhibition.
About the artist
Dublin-born artist K.B. Clear paints portraits of strangers found in archives. His work is held in public and private collections and exists at the intersection of contemporary painting and theatre. Through a theatrical lens, his subjects become characters on a stage, their poses and appearances rendered newly observable and open to reimagination. His life-size paintings unfold in non-linear sequences, like film stills from an obscure documentary or scenes from a play. Together, they show how the identities of strangers can be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.
