Kirsten van Schreven is a printmaker and draughtsperson with a Master’s Degree in Fine Art Printmaking from Chelsea School of Art.
She regularly exhibits at the Mall Galleries, Bankside Gallery and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. She has been longlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize 2025 and selected for the Derwent Art Prize 2024, The Wells Art Contemporary in 2018 and 2019, The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2025 and The Discerning Eye in 2014 and 2023. She was also shortlisted for the Mario Avati Prix de Gravure, Academie des beaux-arts, Paris in 2025.
I love drawing, whether it be on printmaking plate, paper or canvas. I am inspired by isolated, partly built, and abandoned skeletal structures that intertwine the themes of creation and decay, construction and destruction. These individual, man-made monuments possess unconventional purposes — remnants of industries, archaic sources of power, echoes of wars and tools of navigation and communication from the past.
For me these are haunting places whose original functions are now obscured, eroded, or lost to time. Using layered pencilwork, paint, and collaged paper, I build and unbuild each image, working through a process of construction and deconstruction until the final image emerges. My drypoint plates also mirror this process, with engraved layers that are burnished back, redrawn and refined until the final image emerges. These processes reflect the slow degradation of architecture and memory alike – nothing is ever truly erased, only buried beneath new layers.
2025
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize
The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition
The New English Art Club Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London
2024
The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition
The Derwent Art Prize, Oxo Gallery, London
2023
ING Discerning Eye, The Mall Galleries, London
The London Group Open, The Copeland Gallery, London
The New English Art Club Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London
2020
The New English Art Club Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London
2019
The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition
The Wells Art Contemporary Awards, Wells Cathedral
2018
The Wells Art Contemporary, Wells Cathedral
2017
The Masters : Monoprint, Bankside Gallery, London
2016
The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition
The Original Print Show curated by Norman Ackroyd RA at The Zillah Bell Gallery
The National Original Print Exhibition, Bankside Gallery, London
The National Open Art Competition, Mercers’ Hall, London
The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers: The Masters – Etching, Bankside Gallery, London
ING Discerning Eye at The Mall Galleries, London
Awarded the Editorial Prize by ‘Printmaking Today’ – the Journal of The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and The Stuart Southall Print Prize at The Royal Society of British Artists 301st Exhibition, London 2018.