Blue Shop Gallery presents
Isabel Muñoz-Newsome
‘The Other Place’
Gallery 1
7th - 31st October 2026
PV Wednesday 7th October 6-8pm 2026
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm or by appointment
Isabel Muñoz-Newsome is a British - Chilean painter living and working in London. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art receiving an MA in Painting (2025) awarded with the Zsuzi Roboz Scholarship. She received a BA in Theatre Design from Wimbledon School of Art.
Her paintings test the boundary between image and sensation, gesture and imagination. Forms dissolve into undulating piles of colour, wading between figuration and abstraction. In her compositions, figural forms are encountered in various states - from sensual and exuberant to more intimate moments of fall and recovery and often somewhere in between.
The gesture contains the force of the subject and there is a palpable enjoyment in her brush work. It moves sinuously, like muscle contractions, sending flesh rippling in surges of colour, confronting simultaneously the muck of the body and the euphoria of embodiment.
Painting is a place to question the status quo. Finding ways to discuss what exists adjacent to language. There is a low and fizzing noise, a warm drone that could be said to be humming in her works.
Rooted in a deep understanding of form and space through observational drawing and painting, the resulting compositions take flight into a particular and unnamed place. It could be a dark stage, a closed room or a plateau: ‘The Other Place’.
Exhibition text - by Izabella Scott:
The Other Place gathers Isabel Muñoz-Newsome’s recent oil paintings into a world of ritual, pleasure and transformation. Settings drawn from the classical imagination become stages for gatherings of bodies, where figures merge, dissolve and vibrate at the edge of another reality. The paintings ask how such a crossing might occur – through desire, performance, abandon, ecstatic play or the imaginative force of paint itself.
In a central trio – ‘The Other Place’, ‘The Fruit of the Fall’ and ‘And We Crossed Over’ – heaped figures slip towards abstraction. Currents of alizarin, sienna and mottled green surgeover rosy mounds of flesh. As limbs, hollows and folds intertwine, personhood gives way to sensation, and pleasure becomes a means of passage. The fall evoked is not one of punishment, but sensual descent: an entry into an intensified, unstable state.
Over multiple rabbit-skin glue grounds, Muñoz-Newsome works thickened oils into restless, luminous surfaces. Painting becomes a performance of the hand: a sequence of pressure, drag, touch and release. Across several works, gatherings unfold on dimly perceived stages, in scenes that hover between dance, erotic encounter and ritual spectacle. In ‘Tarantella’, an audience watches as glossy blue-black forms multiply, gleam and entangle, their limbs proliferating into feverish configurations. Elsewhere, smaller works contract into private moments of bathing, repose and shared pleasure while open-air, Bacchanalian scenes break into motion; naked bodies loll and dance amid splashes of emerald and turquoise. In ‘The Christening’, this earthly excess gives way to a blinding vision. Pale figures gather beside a stream, their forms suspended in a radiant wash of light, as though the painting has passed beyond the boundaries of flesh. The scene offers a fleeting glimpse of the other place: not a stable destination but a dazzling threshold where bodies glimmer, light pulses through paint, and the visible world seems briefly to open onto another order.
Recent exhibitions include: Could You Come to Me at Ione & Mann, London (2026) Over the Edge (solo), curated by Kira Streletzki, Berlin (2025), b-sides at calcio, London, curated by Hannah Perry, (2026), One Enters A Room, The Dot Project (2026), In the Company of at Sid Motion Gallery London (2025), Woke Up Feeling Better, Staffordshire Street Gallery, London (2023) which she also curated.
She has also worked extensively in theatre design working on shows in London’s West End, on Broadway NYC and across Europe. Alongside painting Isabel is also a musician. She is co-creator of the band Pumarosa and currently working on a solo project set to release in 2027. At her exhibition, Over the Edge, during Berlin Gallery Week, a triptych was acquired by the Onnasch collection.
hello@blueshopcottage.com for all catalogue requests.
