Tiffany Foster’s paintings feel ghostly or maybe even unsettling. A lot of that comes from how close she gets to her subjects, almost as if she’s trying to study them properly, but they won’t hold still long enough. You end up waiting for something: for a person to breathe, for a blurred face to come into focus, for a spider to finally crawl out of the flower. Nothing seems resolved, but maybe that’s the whole point.
Tiffany Foster, Surprise!, Acrylic on Paper, 2025
There’s also a sense that each subject has been lifted out of its world and set down in front of us with no context at all. No room, no background, no story to lean on, just one living form, isolated and magnified until it’s the only thing you can look at. It reads like an attempt to stop something in place, a feeling, a relationship, a moment of fear, and to face it head-on rather than look away. In a painting called “Sunday,” a woman’s face is cropped so tightly that only the eyes and nose really register. It’s hard to tell what the sitter is thinking or feeling. Her eyes are beautiful, tilted upward, as if she’s trying to grasp something just out of reach. The colours are dark and serious throughout, which adds to the sense that these are not easy or comfortable images.
Tiffany Foster, Sunday, Oil on Panel, 2024
In another painting, “Immersion (Long Exposure)”, currently on show as part of Sfumato Art Creatives’ July 2026 group exhibition, three women appear together, all of them blurred, as if none of them can quite be pinned down. You can’t make out expressions or even settle on individual features, only the suggestion of three separate presences caught somewhere between memory and disappearance. It’s less a portrait than a trace of one, which fits how Foster seems to think about memory throughout her work, as something that keeps moving no matter how hard you try to hold it still. That’s also what makes the painting sit so comfortably within this particular show, which brings together artists from a wide range of cultural backgrounds working across painting, photography, collage, and mixed media, loosely organised around identity, memory, transformation, and human connection. Foster’s own preoccupation with memory as something unstable and half-formed speaks directly to what the exhibition is trying to hold together across such different practices.
Tiffany Foster, Immersion (Long Exposure), Oil on Canvas, 2026
You can tell Foster knows exactly what she’s doing technically. She could easily paint something that just sits there and looks finished. Instead she seems to want the moment right before things change, before someone moves, ages, or slips out of view, more than she wants a clean, final version of them.
Foster’s work sits somewhat apart from what tends to dominate London’s galleries right now, where a strong idea often carries a show more than the painting itself does. Her strength runs the other way. The handling is confident and considered, yet she resists giving her subjects any tidy conclusion, and that unresolved quality is what keeps the work from feeling merely decorative. It would be good to see more painters given room to work this way. I’m genuinely curious to see where she takes this practice next.