Hobson's oil paintings feature friends and colleagues rendered in thick impasto. Her female subjects are shown strong and confident as they chat with friends or gaze thoughtfully beyond the frame. She often presents her figures from high or low vantage points, giving them an imposing and monumental presence.
Ania Hobson is a British painter whose large-scale portraits reinterpret the figure through unconventional perspectives, narrative staging, and a contemporary engagement with fashion and identity. Recognised for her distinctive approach to portraiture, Hobson’s work was awarded the BP Portrait Award for Young Artist at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2018. The prize-winning painting, A Portrait of Two Female Painters—depicting Hobson and her sister-in-law, the artist Stevie Dix—marked a decisive moment in her career and established her as one of the most compelling voices in British figurative painting today.
Her work has since received significant international attention, including a feature in Elle magazine’s 2019 profile of the UK’s “Instagram’s British Artists” and selection for the Venice Biennale (Personal Structures, GAA Foundation). Hobson’s paintings are held in collections and exhibited widely across Europe and North America, including in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States.
Hobson’s portraits are immediately recognisable for their deliberate play of scale and viewpoint. Sitters are frequently depicted from very high or low perspectives, which elongates their figures and imbues them with a monumental quality, while their casual, slouching poses introduce a sense of familiarity and intimacy. Her compositions carry a narrative undertone, often resembling fragments of psychological or social drama. The artist carefully directs her sitters—many of whom are close friends or family members—to perform gestures or expressions that heighten this staged, cinematic quality.
Fashion is integral to Hobson’s practice. Overcoats, Doc Martens, Burberry check, and platform boots appear recurrently, situating her figures in a distinctly contemporary register and aligning her practice with portraitists such as David Hockney and Chloe Wise. Hobson describes this sartorial element as a conscious strategy to capture the sensibilities of her generation.
Although now firmly established as a portraitist, Hobson began her career in landscape and wildlife painting. Growing up in Suffolk, she studied at the University of Suffolk (BA, 2011), the Prince’s Drawing School, London, and the Florence Academy of Art. Her early work was exhibited by the Society of Wildlife Artists at the Mall Galleries, London. A turning point came in 2017 when a self-portrait was accepted into the BP Portrait Award exhibition, leading her to pivot decisively toward portraiture.
Today, Hobson works from her studio, Asylum, located in a former Royal Air Force station in Suffolk. From this rural setting, she continues to develop a body of work that merges painterly tradition with contemporary aesthetics, balancing intimacy with monumentality, and engaging critically with questions of gender, identity, and the performativity of everyday life.