Holly Halkes studied her first BA in Fashion Design acquiring a love for print design and bold colours. She then went on to study Fine Art at the City & Guilds of London Art School, graduating in 2022. Since then Halkes has had exhibitions internationally with galleries in Milan at Tube Culture Hall, in Stuttgart at Better Go South and in Madrid at Badr El Jundi. She has also presented works at London Art Fair, was a winner of the Delphian open call and has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Albert Contemporary in Odense at the end of the year. Halkes’s paintings engage with the values of the carnivalesque circulating around themes of free interaction, breaking down barriers and playing on eccentric behaviours through her own experiences of what it feels like to live in the 21st Century. Halkes is interested in creating an alternate social space characterised by freedom and abundance to explore human behaviours and social interactions that border between real life and fantasy. The work often centres around humour and the relationship we have with it to question self- identity and our surroundings. This is often seen through the artist’s gusto in the way paint is applied which allows for fun moments and laughter. Underneath the surface the paintings touch upon internal and external conflicts of sense of self and the world around us, projecting both a vulnerability and a level of anxiety.