YULIA HAP
YULIA HAP
b. 1998, Wrocław, Poland Based in Glasgow, Scotland
My work is a collage through paint, drawing from historical images, film stills, digital culture, and moments from my immediate surroundings and emotional landscape. Working instinctively, I fragment these sources to trace a nonverbal logic through the process of painting. I don’t seek resolutions within this method, but flashes of understanding amid the dissonance of contemporary life.
In my work Auguries of Exit, I imagine a decadent banquet in a world already ended, a slow-motion apocalypse disguised by excess, fantasy, and spectacle. Auguries of Exit arose out of Auguries of Innocence. William Blake envisioned a world where the infinite could be seen in the ordinary, where nature’s abundance reflected a cosmic order. This world was eternal and regenerative. Today, such cycles are no longer guaranteed; the natural world no longer seems to hold the promise of endless returns. Instead, humanity conducts a mass taxidermy of what once appeared immutable - tempos of land, ocean, sky, all pointing toward some end.
Blake’s Innocence has given way to the unquiet, where the future feels lost, quivering between decay and disappearance. My vandalized Blakean verse: “To see a world in a grain of plastic, and a heaven in a wild inferno, hold smartphone in the palm of your hand, and exit in an hour” marks this shift: a world of endless returns at a misstep with a synthetic present exhausted by technology and crises.
Within this theme of a slow-burning mundane exit, my paintings navigate between humour and horror. The excess of a modern-day Cockaigne turns into a kind of eulogic rot, a covert funeral rite playing out in isolated figures and sickly textures. I am interested in a visual language that moves between raw emotion and absurdity, realism and deconstruction.
I paint with thin layers, often wiping away paint to carve objects and gestures through subtraction. Many of my textures are created through grattage with materials such as plastic and rags. I find that these reductions and imprints become auguries themselves - faint omens of instability etched into the fraying or disfigured subjects and objects. Ultimately, I aim for my paintings to mirror a world inching toward ruin beneath its own excess.
EDUCATION
2022–25 First Class Honours, BA Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art
AWARDS
2026 The RSA Art Prize
2025 Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries Selected Artist
RESIDENCIES
2026 Dumfries House Residency, Royal Drawing School
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2026 While We Are Here, N’Atelier, Glasgow
2026 New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
2026 The Quiet Gaze, Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow
2025 Environmental Rendering, Sanki, Edinburgh
2025 Breakouts, Artpistol Gallery, Glasgow
2025 Degree Show, Glasgow School of Art
2025 Weird Studies Vol. II, Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow
2024 Strata, French Street, Glasgow
2023 Weird Studies, Ushi’s, Glasgow
2023 Momentum, Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow
2023 Narrative Encounters, Reid Gallery, Glasgow
PUBLICATIONS
2025 Ideas in Print: The GSA Essay Anthology, Glasgow School of Art
2025 SUBLIMINAL, Glasgow
SELECTED PLATFORMS & EXPERIENCE
2025 Featured Artist Selection, Hypha Curates (Hypha Studios)
2025 Curator, Weird Studies Vol. II, Glasgow
2023 Curator, Weird Studies, Glasgow
2022 Artist Assistant, Sonica Biennial (Cryptic), Glasgow
COLLECTIONS
2026 Dumfries House Collection, UK
2026 3 Private Collections, UK
2025 Private collection, Italy