Meet the Muse Residents of 2025

Ben Grosse-Johannboecke (b. 2002) is a painter living and working in London. He graduated from Chelsea College of Art (Graduate Diploma Fine Art) in 2024. His work has been exhibited internationally including Mamut Art Project 11 (Istanbul, Turkey), CICA Museum (Gimpo, South Korea) as well as in multiple shows in London. He has been selected for the Muse Residency programme 2025. The constant fight Ben finds himself in is between an autonomous, art-intrinsic practice and a politically engaged one. He deconstructs images attributed to socio-political content with interventions that gradually strip them of these features. Based on a previous series of paintings in which video documents from primarely the Russia-Ukraine conflict were abstracted, these works further widen the distance between the work and its source.

Mei To Man is a Visual artist based in London and Hong Kong. Man obtained her MFA(Sculpture) from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2024.  She received a BA(Painting) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) in 2017, majoring in painting. Man’s artworks tell stories with materials as the point of departure, and delves into various mediums on a technical level. Through observing the intimacy of the body, she explores urban vistas, life under urbanisation, and transient things. Her works aim to raise awareness of the existence of all kinds of beings as well as the connections between their fragility and silence by objectifying, cloning, reconstructing, or quantifying elements found in everyday life.  Man is the selected artist of Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists' Studio Residency 2021. Man has exhibited in institutions such as Power Station of Art (Shanghai,2024), Tangent Projects (Barcelona,2024), Lewisham Arthouse (London,2024), CHAT- Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong,2022), Kyushu Geibun-kan (Fukuoka, Japan), Rossi & Rossi (Hong Kong, 2020), Gallery EXIT (Hong Kong, 2020), Oil Street Art Space (Hong Kong,2019-2020) and Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences (Hong Kong,2018), Hong Kong Arts Centre ( Hong Kong, 2017), among others.

Lukas Leisinger is a London-based artist. He has recently graduated from a BA Fine Art Course at Chelsea College of Art. His work delves into the intricate relationship between memory and image. Central to their practice is the question, “Is this an image of a memory or a memory of an image?” This inquiry drives their exploration of how images can both corrupt and preserve memories. Utilising a repetitive process of applying and scraping off paint, Lukas captures the essence of fleeting moments. Influenced by photography and cinema, his paintings memorialise experiences, imbuing them with a haunting sense of time. Through this meticulous technique, he invites viewers to reflect on their own recollections and the images that shape them.

Kirti Virmani is an Indian born multi-disciplinary with a masters in Print from the Royal College of Art, London. She primarily works with photography, printmaking, and ceramic sculptural forms. Her work delves into the poetics and politics of gender, nature, and spirituality. Through meditative visuals, she invites viewers to contemplate the art of gracefully floating within life’s ebb and flow.  With a background in photography, Kirti is currently expanding her practice into works on paper and sculptural forms, focusing on minimal landscapes, architecture, and reinterpretations of cultural symbols. She is fascinated by and currently exploring semiology/iconography and spirituality, reinterpreting symbols, practices, and beliefs in contemporary art.