Glen Pudvine United Kingdom, b. 1989

Glen Pudvine is a British figurative painter whose work traverses themes of identity, existentialism, mortality, pop culture and art history. His idiosyncratic and knowingly absurd compositions draw connections between these to question the nature of creativity, culture and the human condition. Since graduating from London’s Royal Academy Schools in 2019, his diverse subjects have included dinosaurs, priapic self portraits, TV sitcom characters, drinking mugs, and portraits of his friends and family. This humorously surreal painting is an homage to Lucian Freud’s Woman with a Daffodil (1945), a portrait of the artist’s lover Lorna Wishart, in which she glares at a yellow daffodil on a table. Like Pudvine, Freud often painted loved ones and was similarly fascinated by the human body. Here, Wishart is replaced by Pudvine’s own partner, who gazes not at a flower but a broken egg containing a cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud (Lucian Freud’s grandfather and the founder of psychoanalysis).