Cathy Lomax

Life and career

Cathy Lomax is an artist mainly known for her figurative paintings. She has a BA Fine Art from London Guildhall University (2000), and an MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2002). She said about painting:

Painting has multiplied, subtracted, repeated and revised real life long before photography let alone photoshop was a gleam in the eye of mankind. It is undoubtedly an ancient art but this longevity does not automatically make it reactionary. Painting is something that we can and should utilise to bind together the past and the future in order to create an important revolutionary vision.

She is the director of Transition Gallery in east London which focuses on new contemporary art by both emerging and established artists.

She also publishes and edits two magazines: Arty, an idiosyncratic publication featuring artwork and thoughts by a group of invited contributors, and Garageland, a glossy art and culture publication which examines pertinent art themes such as beauty, machismo or nature.

Arty was started in April 2001 as a reaction against established art magazines; it is written and illustrated by artists. It was described by her colleague Alex Michon as: an antidote to the kind of dry academic writing about art which was becoming increasingly elitist and out of touch with the kind of riky tiky, hand-made and heartfelt work which was appearing in minuscule galleries throughout the land.

Artist Stella Vine has commented on Lomax:

It’s been great to have the support of Cathy Lomax at Transition Gallery, she has been one of the few people to really believe in me ... she’d say, “great do it, just do it all, you shouldn’t censor yourself so much, stop chucking stuff out !” Nice genuine support without any motive. Cathy paints a bit like Peter Blake. I first came across Cathy’s magazine ‘Arty’ a little art fanzine at the Serpentine gallery bookshop ... the energy in her magazine, and the childishness of it, I thought she would be a teenager, she was my age...and she also was running her own gallery ... She’s been a rock...

In 2016 Cathy Lomax was announced winner of the inaugural 'Contemporary British Painting Prize' for her painting "Black Venus".

Shows

Exhibitions include:
The Blind Spot (Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, 2017)
The Image Duplicator (Contemporary Art Projects, London, 2009)
The Golden Record (Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2008)
Vignettes (Rosy Wilde 2006)
She's No Angel (James Coleman 2004)
Girl on Girl (Transition Gallery 2003)

Books

"Arty: Greatest Hits" Transition Editions, ISBN 0-9548954-1-X (an anthology of excerpts from issues 1-16)