YULIA HAP
Yulia Hap b. 1998 in Wrocław, Poland. Based in Glasgow, Scotland.
I view my practice as a form of taxidermy, drawing on historical images, film stills, digital culture, and lived experience. Working instinctively, I fragment these sources to trace a nonverbal logic through the process of painting.
Taxidermy seizes an irreversible event: life, now suspended, denying matter the reality of death. My practice centres on performing taxidermy on the world as I see it, and on what the remnants of this operation might be. In this sense, painting for me is a form of recording the present as history: snapshots of a world preserved in anticipation of its eventual disappearance.
My ongoing inquiry Auguries of Exit subverts the first verse of Auguries of Innocence. Blake envisions a world where the infinite could be seen in the ordinary, where nature’s abundance reflects a cosmic order. Today, such cycles are no longer guaranteed: the natural world no longer seems to hold the promise of endless returns. Human lives have always been finite, but natural and cosmic timescales extended beyond mortality, providing a sense of purpose or orientation. It is this continuity that now feels precarious. Humanity conducts a mass taxidermy of what once appeared immutable: tempos of land, ocean, sky, all pointing toward some end.
My vandalised 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 odds with an exhausted synthetic present. I translate this excess of a modern-day Cockaigne into a kind of rot, a covert funeral rite playing out in isolated figures and sickly textures.
My paintings arise out of this place, at an imagined midnight: a point where time no longer advances cleanly, but gathers, thickens and begins to strain. This world is held in a suspended breath, where continuity falters and familiar systems atrophy. Here, technological forms persist beyond their own fragility, sustained by belief rather than function. Bodies enter unfamiliar proximities with other orders of life, while boundaries between species soften. The paintings gather human, technological, ecological and geological timescales onto the same unstable surface. The works register temporal disorientation as known continuities erode. I work toward surfaces where the omen, the strain, and the remnant - my imagined modes of exit - coexist simultaneously.
I paint in thin oil layers - treating light as subtractive, carved out of the surface as faint irradiation. The physical topography of the canvas oscillates between reflective synthetic glazes and matted, scratched areas. I paint through grattage with plastic and rags, and drag organic materials such as feathers and foliage through the wet paint. These reductions and imprints become auguries themselves - faint omens of instability etched into the fraying forces that guide my hand. The mark becomes a remnant; the remnant becomes an omen.
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 ArtEvol 2026, Saatchi Gallery, London
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 School of Art
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