©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 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. »