Thea Schultz graduated in 2024 with a first class fine art degree from Arts University Bournemouth. Alongside managing and teaching at Art-K studio in Reading, Schultz has exhibited recently at  Turps Gallery, London (2024) as-well as in her graduate show at Arts University Bournemouth (2024).

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 Schultz’s work reimagines classical artistic representations of women, reclaiming the autonomy of women who have been cast aside as passive muses. Drawing heavily from mythology, art history, and literature, Schultz creates paintings that elevate her subjects to positions of empowerment and agency. By referencing ancient Greek and Roman statues alongside the symbolic language of European art history, she presents these women as active, divine figures who inhabit their own multi-layered inky worlds.

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The artwork’s subjects radiate in metallics, magentas and blues, evoking the divine and the contemplative. Through her process-led ink drawings and translucent, intuitive applications of paint, she further reveals the transformative potential of her subjects by situating them within vivid oases where solitude becomes a source of power. Motifs of archways and wildly growing plants that enwrap the subjects are ever-recurring within the paintings, evoking a glimpse of retreat and a place for private existence encouraged by the land. Through embedding iconology of European art history into a female haven of nature, the artworks transform the passive female muse into an empowered subject through offering the subjects a sanctuary within their natural environment.The recurring incorporation of lily pads and bodies of water in the artworks engages with traditional sites of tragedy within art history,  as we acknowledge them in the infamous ‘Ophelia’ by John Everett Millais, as Schultz presents these elements of iconology as sources of refuge and renewal rather than fragility.

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The artwork challenges viewers to reconsider the visual role of women in art history, offering an alternative vision that celebrates their natural agency, furthermore encouraging us in the contemporary world to connect to the versions of ourselves that exist beyond the eyes of those who view us within the frame that is painted for us.