The Glasgow School of Art’s (GSA) prestigious Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme unveils its 2026 graduate exhibition, which runs from 13 to 21 June at The GSA’s Stow Building. This year’s MFA graduate show takes place across floors 1, 3, and 4 of the building, presenting an extraordinary exhibition of new works by city-two international artists. This year’s MFA exhibition is staged alongside the 2026 programme of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, highlighting the crucial role that The GSA, its students, and graduates share within the thriving, interdependent cultural ecosystem of the city.
Since its inception in 1988, the two-year MFA programme has used practice-based studio learning to support students in sustaining an ongoing artistic practice. The approach of the MFA emphasises group dynamics and situates learning within the city of Glasgow, its art institutions and DIY spaces, while giving the cohort confidence to develop their own approaches. This community-focused approach encourages deep engagement with urgent and contemporary social and cultural issues, as well as bold approaches to making and performance.
“The Master of Fine Art programme at The Glasgow School of Art is an exceptional, hopeful environment built on a rich history of creative experimentation. Within this postgraduate community, which draws students from across the globe to Glasgow, we encourage students to notice the world, spend time with people, and deeply engage with contemporary visual culture and the politics of representation. “ Says Margaret Salmon, The Glasgow School of Art’s Programme Leader of Master of Fine Art.
“This programme allows students to step outside their comfort zones, take major creative risks, and complicate their artistic output. By anchoring their practices within Glasgow’s dynamic contemporary art scene, students gain an authentic, multi-perspective narrative. They learn to use analogue materiality, visual mediums, and collaborative artistic practices to articulate the everyday. Our aim is to empower individuals to reclaim creative technologies for universal purposes, graduating as bold, interdisciplinary creators who are fully ready to guide and shape the future of global visual culture.”
Hannah Miller’s practice is a continual exploration of faith, family, and the human body, as she attempts to reconcile the sacred and the profane. Working in painting, printmaking, and sculpture, Hannah investigates the body as a site of vulnerability, guilt, and “reverence slipping into appetite”. Hannah views her practice as an act of penance; her unstable, dissolving figures inhabit uncomfortable, porous spaces where love reveals its teeth, refusing to resolve tensions but instead honouring the messy, excessive realities of needing, feeding, and being witnessed. Finn Robinson creates large-scale figurative paintings that feel their way through the canonical legacies of Western art history. Using European source material, and treating art history as a living source, Finn depicts fragmented queer identities— allowing truth to shift through colour and gesture toward personal desire— and exploring awkwardness, shame, and excess through a contemporary gaze. Finn’s paintings operate like a form of theatre, where figures inhabit shifting states of identity, performing versions of the self that are repeated, misread, and reformed.
Kate Glenn employs a queer, feminist lens to obsessively recreate moments from her life through oil painting, performance, screen printing, and video. Referencing timestamped selfies, she memorialises landmark events involving sexual encounters to provide a glimpse into the timeline of her life. Her practice also delves into internal bodily experiences, addressing her reproductive system and past medical interventions like IVF and laparoscopy. Through a slow process of layered painting, Kate explores the body as a site of both sexual narrative and medical history. Informed by a 20-year career in digital media, Bonae Yi explores how screen-based images condition perception. Moving between digital and material states, Bonae engages light as a physical event—reflected and scattered—rather than a controlled emission. By layering acrylic and residue on transparent industrial vinyl, she translates the logic of the screen into physical surfaces that hold time, resistance, and trace. Her work seeks to recover a sensory awareness, often unnoticed in our screen-based experiences, negotiating the tension between transparency and opacity, where both digital experience and material sensation coexist.
Coire Simpson navigates entanglements of time, space and being through sound and vibration. Approaching these through embodied knowledge and listening practices, Coire explores how sensory perception shapes the self. Her work creates spaces where “demands of coherence and composure unravel,” allowing bodies to become present and porous. By inhabiting vibrational moments where frequencies modulate us before thought, Coire treats listening and speaking as an emancipatory acts, making sensible the play between proximity, distance, form, and formlessness within our relational existence. Sydney Smith’s monumental sculpture is inspired by François Rabelais’s Pantagruel, a critique of 15th century conservative mores that she feels has strangely contemporary prescience. Constructed from newspaper, chicken wire, and cardboard, the 22-foot papier-mâché work – titled Reverse-Pantagruel – depicts the novel’s giantess Badabec in a birthing position, featuring a video puppet show. Reclaiming the violent literary “nativity” where Badabec is destroyed, Sydney’s conceptual inversion imagines her devouring the novel’s festive procession rather than birthing it, replacing her son’s insatiable appetite with her own in a kind of ‘reverse nativity’.
Leyan Gao explores the creation of “a new self” by transforming into an animal-like character using fur suit costumes, video, and live performance. Leyan constructs identities from soft, furry materials to provide safety and comfort in a shift that allows her to step outside social norms and judgments, achieving emotional liberation through anonymity. Layan’s process involves digital modelling and pattern-making, resulting in a “mask” that redistributes the viewer-subject relationship and fosters a freer, depersonalised mode of existence. Sebastian Lendenmann investigates the global architecture of AI and its ‘frog in boiling water’ effect on human perception. By experimenting with localised AI models rather than massive platform data systems, his work, which operates as part exhibition and part essay, delves into the possibilities of digital imaging, exploring the erosion of agency and digital decay. Through videos, installations, textile prints, and resin-embedded images, Sebastian bridges the intangible digital and the tangible physical. Adopting a “Boredom Brand” as a form of resistance, he questions and confronts AI’s commodification of intelligence, proposing a slower, critical material resistance.
Rho McGuire’s ‘everything I wanted to’, is a movement-based project developed through experimental community workshops where the priority is mutual listening and reciprocity. Treating community as a living ecosystem, Rho maps the body as the essential instrument to choreograph encounters that encourage participants to transcend their individuality. This live dance performance and film, scored with rural Scottish field recordings, embodies local weather patterns. By engaging with improvisation and reference to tectonic plates, Rho questions how folk-dance can facilitate collective living where movement is not owned, but borrowed, passed on, or inherited. Choin work engages with a queer sensibility that is already damp or slowly seeping. It is not a clearly defined difference but rather a subtle sense of dissonance. She attends to minute bodily attunements that respond to atmosphere. These sensations form the weight of an air in which we are already immersed, unresolved, hard to dispel, existing less as distinct events than as states that settle into the body over time.
The MFA 2026 has been sponsored by Arthouse Hotel, who have partnered with The Glasgow School of Art to announce the Art House Award this year. The award is structured around a bursary, and the production of a public commission on site at the historical hotel building on Bath Street, which will be renewed every year. The first recipient of the award is Kate Glenn, whose work is currenlty on display on the facade of the Art House Hotel.
The MFA 2025 exhibition will run from 13 – 21 June at the Stow Building, 43 Shamrock Street, Glasgow. The timetable of performances which will take place on the evening preview on 12 June, and will take place throughout the exhibition run, can be found in the Notes for Editors below.
The exhibition is also available to explore on-line at the GSA’s 2026 digital showcase, which will continue after the physical exhibition has ended. www.gsashowcase.co.uk
For further information contact press@gsa.ac.uk.
NOTES FOR EDITORS
Full list of artists exhibiting new work at MFA 2026:-
Yu Wang, Yiwen Bo, Pu Zhao, Ziyi QiuYujin, Lee Yafei, LiuLeyan Gao, Jingfei Ge, Grace Ren, Bonae Yi, Choin Lee, Angelia Li, Yalu Xiong, Yuchen Liu, Noru Innes, Jaeyoun Lee, Sunwoo Lee, Colm Moore, Romy Zaman, Siyuan Chen, Yimeng Chen, Yingru Feng, Shanglin Li, Rho Mcguire, Nina Murphy, Ha Rin Park, Joanne Ning, Yanfei Wang, Torin Fielder, Tobias Allen, Sophie Cooke, Keith Malone, Pien Overing, Sydney Smith, Janet Beesley, Haneen Hadiy, Shannen Muhl, Charlie Turner, Finn Robinson, Coire Simpson, Qiongshan Lin, Eliza Wagener, Calypso Keane, Freya Patterson, Kate Glenn, Francis Waterton, George Belmonte, Eimhéar Atkinson, John James Perangie, Hannah Peddie Miller, Sebastian Lendenmann, Fae Lael Borodiansky / Sarah Leah.
NB* – images referenced in the release are not necessarily indications of new work which will be featured in the exhibition.
Performance Schedule
FRIDAY 12 JUNE
18.00 : Fae Borodiansky ‘Oracle Readings’, Space 2, Floor 1 (drop-in readings from 18.00 – 19.00)
18.30 : Coire Simpson ‘The Piano’s Broken Harp’, Floor 4 Stairwell (duration 15/20 minutes.
19.00 : Rho McGuire & Friends ‘everything I wanted to’ Space 52, Floor 4 (duration 12 minutes).
19.30 : Tobias Allen ‘Against All; Hold’ Space 42, Floor 3 (duration approx. 20-30mins)
Participants – Tobias Allen, Ian Van Tillo. Performance of Variable Length
SUNDAY 14 JUNE
11.00 – 12.00 & 13.30 – 17.00 : Performance by Leyan Gao ‘Me and Me’ happening throughout the Stow building and external green spaces.
13.00 : Rho McGuire & Friends ‘everything I wanted to’ , Space 52, Floor 4 (duration 12 minutes).
TUESDAY 16 JUNE
14.00 : Fae Borodiansky ‘Oracle Readings’ Space 2, Floor 1 (drop-in readings from 18.00 – 19.00)
18.00 : A Conversation Between Painters Tea Talk, Annex Gallery, Floor 1, Moderated & Organised by Yafei Liu, with invited Artists & Painters: Bonae Yi, Eliza Wagener, Hannah Peddie Miller.
THURSDAY 18 JUNE
18.00 : Fae Borodiansky ‘Oracle Readings’ Space 2, Floor 1 (drop-in readings from 18.00 – 19.00)
SUNDAY 21 JUNE
13.00 : Rho McGuire & Friends ‘everything I wanted to’ Space 52, Floor 4 (duration 12 minutes).
13.45 : Coire Simpson, Tobias Allen, ‘Untitled Improvisation with Pianos’, Floor 4 Stairwell (Performance of Variable Length)
About The Glasgow School of Art
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines – ranking 8th in the world and 5th in Europe in the QS World University Rankings 2026. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world.
Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3,500 students and staff across architecture, design, digital, fine art and innovation in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1,500 students annually.
About Arthouse Glasgow
Arthouse Glasgow will be the first own-brand hotel by new British hotel group, Oberland – offering 76 bedrooms at a range of price points, as well as a restaurant and bar/lounge.
With a nod to Glasgow’s urban setting and industrial roots, the original fabric of the building has been preserved and brought forward. Wooden panelling, pine floors, an original birdcage lift and stained glass windows sit alongside contemporary interventions, with each layer of the building’s history made legible. The exposed aesthetic and neutral tones are offset by a curated mix of vintage and contemporary furniture. Designed by studio A-nrd, the look and feel will draw inspiration from the hotel’s name and the city’s artistic soul, embodying the eclectic style of an artist’s home – with pieces by local makers adding warmth, authenticity and personality.
On the ground floor, guests and non-residents can dine at Celentano’s by Anna and Dean Parker, who have gained a strong reputation for their Italian-influenced cooking. After five years building one of the city’s most loved restaurants – which earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand within six months of opening – the pair are relocating Celentano’s to Arthouse, with a refreshed look and menu, and twice as many covers as their previous home. At the heart of the house is a lounge space for locals, visitors and guests. The snacks and drinks here will also be led by Celentano’s – including their own liqueurs, such as vermouth for their Celentano’s Negroni.
Oberland has partnered with some of the city’s most vital cultural voices across everything from programming to print – including the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow International and Illyus Brown of Illyus & Barrientos – embedding the house in the city’s cultural life. Thoughtful touches include in-room reading by Ripe Mags, and artworks by local and Scottish artists sourced in collaboration with notable galleries such as the Patricia Fleming gallery.
