©Liza Miri, Photographe, 2016
Rosalie Oakman is a French-British artist based in Hackney Wick, London. Her practice spans painting, drawing, and textile – rooted in a sustained inquiry into the human body, sexuality, identity, and what it means to survive.
She works from life. Her large-format paintings and drawings in acrylic, oil, and charcoal trace the tensions between beauty and decay, tenderness and rupture, the delicate and the raw. Her textile works – made in lace, crochet, and hand-tufted yarn – treat cloth as flesh, and the body as archive.
Her work is autobiographical and politically grounded. It does not look away. Her Erased series – which includes Where I was raped and Le prix d’être une femme – names what it documents: sexual violence, the female body under patriarchy, survival.
She also writes in French. Pensées Nocturnes and Rêveries are bodies of work in poetry and short prose; the writing practice runs alongside and beneath the visual work.
Her influences include Egon Schiele, Jenny Saville, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin, and František Kupka – artists who refused to soften the body, who painted flesh as fact.
Oakman studied at Les Beaux-Arts d’Angers (2015–2019) before completing a BA and MA in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2019–2021).
She has exhibited extensively in London and Paris – at Mall Galleries, Courtauld Institute of Art, Colnaghi Gallery, The Trampery, and the Salon du dessin érotique. In 2022 she was awarded the BADA Art Prize.
« I want to understand as much as I can about what it means to be human and sexuality. We are not just the image we present to the world. We are the minds and bodies that we inhabit.»