British School at Rome Fine Arts Winter Open Studios

The British School at Rome Winter Open Studios 2025, is an event dedicated to artists in residence Award holders and Fellows at the BSR.

In this Fine Arts Winter Open Studios, Rome, 3-4 December 2025, the artists presenting their research were: Juan Bolivar – UAL Rome Research Fellow, Sarah Casey – Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Research Resident, Sibghat Khan – Giles Worsley Rome Fellow, Danny Leyland – Abbey Scholar, Owain Train McGilvary – Creative Wales-BSR Fellow, Janette Parris – Bridget Riley Fellow, Bishwadhan Rai – Sainsbury Scholar, Prem Sahib – Abbey Fellow, Xavier Vasco – Rome Scholar in Architecture.

The event represents a different way of experiencing research in progress, that aims to give the audience a broader insight into the artists’ work, to discover their residency projects, their creative practices and, most importantly, to understand how a new environment, meetings and network with the local artistic community, can give rise to new experimentations.

As part of my research at BSR I engaged with the social setting of fresco paintings with special focus on case studies such as Livia’s Garden, House of Augustus and St Ignatius Room in Rome, and the Room of Mysteries and House of the Orchards in Pompeii to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, immersive 'total work of art' encompassing a variety coalescing outputs and ideas including paintings, photographs, found objects, film, sound and installation; considering colour, perspective and illusion in the interior space of frescoes but also the (less visible) surrounding objects, music and lighting of rooms with ‘lucernaes’ or oil lamps.

In my practice I bring together disparate contexts for viewing and interpretation of painting. As a South American-born artist I am deeply influenced by Latin American Geometric Abstraction. Translocating to the UK in the 1980s heightened my awareness of this movement’s connections to Europe and North America. This enquiry has expanded to explore abstraction’s cross-cultural presence across new territories, from Dansaekhwa Korean monochromes, cinema, popular culture and now fresco painting during this British School at Rome Fellowship.

• Organisation
• https://bsr.ac.uk/meet-the-artists-juan-...
• https://juanbolivar.com/home.html