CALLING
Laura L Bell | Vincent Hawkins | Kristen Healy | Lee Johnson | Enzo Marra | Olivia O’Dwyer | Anne Ryan | Jack Shearing | Sukey Sleeper | Sophie von Hellermann | Charles Williams
12 July – 13 September 2026
To mark five years of its annual painting prize, The Lido Stores presents ‘Calling’, a group exhibition bringing together works by the artists who have shaped the prize and elevated its prestige from both sides of the process — its judges and its winners.
The exhibition highlights what makes the Lido Open unique: selection made on a peer level, guided by the experience, intuition and material understanding formed over decades of painterly practice.
‘Calling’ celebrates that peer-to-peer exchange. By presenting the works of judges and prize-winners side by side, the exhibition honours painting as a vocation — a discipline sustained through commitment to craft and exploration of the medium. Though the artists’ approaches vary widely, the exhibition reveals a shared ground: a belief in the continued relevance of painting and in the value of the painter’s eye.
Installation Views
Laura L Bell
Black Cloud Candy Floss, 2024-25, Mixed media on patchworked canvas, 80 x 95cm, £3000
Vincent Hawkins
Winged Horse, 2026, Oil on panel, 30.5 x 23cm, £2400
Kristen Healy
Water Bear, 2026, Oil on linen, 21 x 29.5cm, £500
Lee Johnson
Paddle Boarder at Midnight, 2024-26, Oil, oil pastel on canvas, 61 x 51 cm, £2200
Lee Johnson
Paddle Boarder (study III), 2026 oil on canvas 25.5 x 20.5 cm £950
Enzo Marra
Gift, 2026, Acrylic & nail varnish on wood,15 x 15cm, £450
Enzo Marra
Happening, 2026, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24cm £1250
Olivia O’Dwyer
Something That Lives Within Us, 2026, 50 x 60 cm, Oil on panel, £1000
Anne Ryan
Slam Dance, 2024, Oil and beeswax on cutout aluminium, 34 x 47cm, £2500
Jack Shearing
Studio Window, 2026, Oil on Card mounted on Cradled Panel, 13 x 21cm £200
Sukey Sleeper
Cast down, 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm, £675
Charles Williams
Falling Man, Horse and Bear, 2022, Oil on canvas, 45 x 40cm, £2000
Sophie von Hellermann
Hot Snacks, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 81.3 x 71.1 cm, £18,000
Laura L Bell
Nighttime Mountain Cave, 2025, 27 x 33cm, Mixed media on board, £395
Vincent Hawkins
Coil, 2025, Oil on panel, 21 x 15cm, £1440
Kristen Healy
Walpol Bay, 2026, Oil on linen, 21 x 29.5cm, 2026, £500
Lee Johnson
Paddle Boarder (study I), 2026 oil, oil pastel on canvas 35.5 x 30.5 cm £1200
Lee Johnson
Night Boarding, 2026 oil on canvas 80 x 60 cm £2800
Enzo Marra
Slim Shelter, 2026, Oil on found canvas, 15 x 15cm, £450
Olivia O’Dwyer
Betwixt and Between, 2026, Oil on panel, 50 x 40 cm £900
Anne Ryan
Wendy O, 2024, Oil & beeswax on cutout aluminium, 33 x 42cm, £2500
Jack Shearing
Waiting, 2026, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 40cm, £400
Jack Shearing
Curtains Drawn, 2026, Oil on Card mounted on Cradled Panel, £200
Sukey Sleeper
Light rain, 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm, £675
Charles Williams
Painter, Parka and Panter, 2023, Oil on canvas, 25 x 30cm, £1500
Vincent Hawkins
Mountain, 2026, Oil on panel, 42 x 29cm, £2880
Vincent Hawkins
Fall & Rise, 2026, Acrylic on paper 200gsm, 160 x 40 x 40cm £570
Kristen Healy
Breaking, 2025, Oil on canvas board, 12.5 x 17.5cm, £300
Lee Johnson
Paddle Boarder (study II), 2026 oil on canvas 31 x 23 cm £1050
Lee Johnson
Winter Painting, 2019, Oil on canvas, 25.5 x 20.3cm, NFS
Enzo Marra
Incident, 2026,, Oil on canvas 31 x 22.5cm, £1250
Olivia O’Dwyer
A Record of Time, 2026, 42 x 50 cm, Oil on panel, £900
Anne Ryan
Moroccan Roll, 2024, Oil & beeswax on cutout aluminium, 25 x 40cm, £2000
Jack Shearing
Tomb, 2026, Oil on linen, 20 x 26cm, £300
Sukey Sleeper
Plummet, 2026, Oil on linen, 40 x 50cm £675
Charles Williams
Champion Self-portrait, 2020, Oil on canvas, 100x40cm, £4000
Sophie von Hellermann
Hot Head, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 51 x 56 cm, £12,000
Our Winners
Lee Johnson, 2021
Johnson’s relationship with painting was shaped by a school trip to Tate Britain, where two contrasting works changed how he saw the medium: a Meredith Frampton portrait whose uncanny smoothness made the painted figure feel eerily alive, and Leon Kossoff’s ‘Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon’, whose thick, seemingly crude paint resolved into something he could almost hear and smell. That tension between stillness and rawness has stayed with him. His process is intuitive rather than planned: he arrives at the studio, starts painting, and lets an idea emerge from the act itself, often only working out what a painting is about while making it. False starts are not failures but openings — each one generates further possibilities. Citing Beckett’s “fail again, fail better”, he treats a day’s unsuccessful work as forward motion nonetheless. Paintings are reworked repeatedly, sometimes becoming unrecognisable from their first motif, in a process he describes as exploratory, alive, and inseparable from painting itself.
Lee Johnson was born in Wiltshire and has lived and worked in London since 2000. He received his MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art in 2001, and his works are held in the collections of Soho House; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; University of the Arts London; and numerous private collections worldwide, including in the UK, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the USA and Australia. Johnson was selected for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize in 2010 and the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2023, and was the winner of the inaugural Lido Stores Open, Margate, in 2021.
Exhibitions in public institutions in the UK include Hastings Contemporary; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; and Huddersfield Art Gallery. Johnson has also exhibited in many private galleries, including Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London; Close, Somerset; Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; Carlsberg Byens Galleri & Kunstsalon, Copenhagen, Denmark; ArTower Agora, Athens, Greece; and Gozo Contemporary, Malta.
Sukey Sleeper, 2022
Sleeper’s work centres on the qualities and weight of water, and the illusion of solidity. For over four years she has focused on a small area near her home in north-east London — roughly a 1.2-mile radius around the New River and East Reservoir Nature Reserve, where she also swims with friends. Her method is deliberately low-fidelity: she observes, sketches, and takes blurred phone photographs she rarely revisits, later reconstructing moments in the studio from memory and fragmentary information. A recurring image is the precarious floating nests built by coots and waterfowl — structures of sticks, leaves and litter that look perpetually on the verge of collapse. These motifs feed her broader preoccupations: what floats versus what is rooted, what can be contained, and what only appears solid but is really reflected light. Though rooted in traditional, almost plain landscape painting, her focus on smaller and smaller patches of water has paradoxically expanded to encompass wider themes — precarity, risk, stability, collapse, repetition, improvisation, and the fluid boundary between inner and outer worlds.
Sleeper was the winner of The Lido Open 2022, and her solo show, ‘Wet Land’, opened the following summer. She has lived and worked in London for the past eight years, and from 2020 to 2022 she took part in the Turps Studio Programme. Prior to this, she studied Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fine Art at Brighton and Hove City College.
Olivia O’Dwyer, 2023
O’Dwyer is a painter based in the south-east of Ireland whose work is driven by metaphor. Her paintings blend figuration, abstraction and personal narrative, approached obliquely rather than directly. She places herself within reimagined domestic interiors that explore identity and her experience as a woman, addressing themes such as empty nest syndrome, ageing, and the friction between making art and managing everyday life. Memory runs through the work via dense, textured layers of paint, beneath which earlier, “failed” paintings are often still visible. The resulting pieces hold humour and unease in equal measure.
O’Dwyer’s work was recently acquired by Wexford County Council’s Art Collection, and is also held in Kathmandu, Nepal, at Wexford Arts Centre, and in many private collections. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Seen and Unseen’, The Lido Stores, Margate, UK, 2024; ‘HomeBird’, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2024; and ‘A Mind’s Eye’, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2022. Invited group exhibitions include the forthcoming ‘Triangulation’, Kunstraum M3, Berlin, Germany, 2025/26; Herman’s Auction House, Dublin, 2025/26 (invited artist); ‘Right Here, Right Now’, Rua Red Arts Centre, Dublin, 2025; ‘Magic and Loss’, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2024; the RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin, 2024; and ‘New Neighbours’, a two-person show, South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel, 2024. Residencies include Uillinn Arts Centre, 2026; SIM, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2024; and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Co. Monaghan, 2022/23. She has written for, and been reviewed in, the VAI, RTE.ie, the Sunday Independent and the Irish Times. She was awarded a Visual Arts Bursary in 2023, an Agility Award in 2022, and Artlinks bursaries in 2020, 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026.
Jack Shearing, 2024
Shearing’s paintings explore memory and subjectivity through depictions of everyday environments. Drawing on architectural spaces and forms, his work considers the traces left by human presence and absence, examining how memory, atmosphere and the uncanny shape the way we experience and perceive space.
Jack Shearing (b. 1998, Brighton, UK) is an artist based in London. He studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2018–21) and completed the postgraduate programme at the Royal Drawing School (2023–24). He has exhibited at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; Christie’s, London; NAG, Walsall; APT Gallery, London; OHSH Projects, London; The Lido Stores, Margate; and The Regency Town House, Brighton. In 2024, he was awarded the Lido Open Award, selected by Vincent Hawkins and Kristen Healy.
Laura L Bell
Bell’s paintings present surreal still lifes drawn from memory and dream, set within twilight landscapes that hover between day and night, observation and the subconscious. She uses scale, placement and colour to stage relationships between unrelated objects within open landscapes. Her work carries an initial sense of unease whose source is not immediately clear, gradually revealed through incorrect geometries, shadows with no obvious source, and a balance between flattened and three-dimensional forms. Textures are built up in layers that are never fully erased, with earlier patterns and colours bleeding through to hint at past decisions. Her canvases are made from stretched, patchworked fabric, allowing her to engage with the painting as a crafted object from the very start, before any paint is applied.
Born in 1987 in Scarborough on the north-east coast of England, Laura L Bell lives and works in London. She studied BA Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2010, and more recently studied at Turps Art School, London, as part of the Off-site Programme (2023–25). Bell was long-listed for the Jacksons Painting Prize 2026. Her Lido Open 2025 entry was chosen as the winning painting from 1,800 submissions by guest judge Sophie von Hellermann and Lido Stores owner-curator Kristen Healy, resulting in the solo show ‘A Black Cloud Held Lightly’.
Our Judges
Enzo Marra, 2021
Marra’s work is shaped by the materials that constitute it, combining traditional media with unexpected, found materials such as glitter and nail varnish. His compositions move away from the purely figurative, using imagery of the body, the unclean and the unwanted to explore human concerns. Some pieces emerge from instinctive, unplanned abstract gestures gradually worked into coherence; others are longer journeys into the unknown. Each direction is pursued fully in its own right, yet remains part of a larger, connected whole, with each work speaking to some aspect of what it means to live in a shared world.
Enzo Marra is a London-based artist who has curated exhibitions across the UK, featuring a diverse array of artists including Richard Deacon, Alison Wilding and Marcus Harvey. He has also selected works for the Lido Open, the Beep Painting Biennale and the Solo Award. He has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and 2016; the Threadneedle Prize in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2016; and the Creekside Open in 2013, 2015 and 2017, where he was chosen as a prize winner by Jordan Baseman in 2017. He has also been selected for the Beep Painting Biennial in 2014, 2016 and 2022, with his paintings highly commended in the 2014 exhibition.
Anne Ryan, 2022
Ryan creates vivid, free-standing cut-out works in card, collage, canvas, ceramic and metal, focused on figures in movement — pulling painting into a more theatrical, three-dimensional realm. She describes the cut-outs as liberating: no longer confined to the four walls of a canvas. For Ryan, painting has often been an act of destruction as much as creation; she has described tearing apart all the paintings she made on her MA, and approaching her large canvases by cutting into them, which led to her first cut-out works. She is not precious about finished paintings, treating destruction as part of the generative process.
Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Ryan now lives in London. She is represented by greengrassi, London. Her work can currently also be seen in her solo exhibition ‘Folkmoot’, Bloomberg Space, London EC4, running to January 2027. Significant solo exhibitions include ‘Tugann an Torann Remix’, greengrassi, London, 2024; ‘Tugann an Torann’, Temple Bar Galleries, Dublin, 2024; ‘Fighting on the Dance Floor’, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter, 2022/23; ‘Sirens’, Turner Contemporary, Margate, 2021–23, for which the work changed four times over the course of the exhibition; ‘The City Rises’, Dilston Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries, London, 2021; ‘Earthly Delites’, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, 2019/20; ‘Euoi, Euoi, Euoi’, Ribot Gallery, Milan, 2019; ‘The Cowboy Paintings’, Turps Gallery, London, 2017; and ‘A Barbarian at the Gate’, greengrassi, London, 2017, as well as seven one-person exhibitions at greengrassi, London, since 2001.
In recent years, Ryan’s work has been included in ‘Entracta’, Moly-Sabata, France, 2025; Paris Internationale, Paris, 2025; ‘Lives Less Ordinary’, Two Temple Place, London, 2024; Ceramic Brussels, Brussels, 2024; ‘Poor Things’, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 2023; ‘Freeze-Frame, Fast-Forward’, Koppel Projects, London, 2023; ‘They Catch Feelings, I Catch Bodies’, Sim Smith, London, 2019; ‘If You Can’t Stand the Heat’, Roaming Gallery, London E8, 2018; ‘Roma IV’, APT Gallery, London, 2018; ‘In the Company of…’, TJ Boulting, London, 2018; ‘Joy Revision’, Galerie Simpson, Swansea, 2018 (part of the Swansea Biennial); ‘Garageland’, Rectory Projects, London E14, 2018; Jean-Luc Blanc, ‘Opera Rock’, CAPC, Bordeaux, France, 2009; and ‘Latest Paintings’, Lia Rumma, Milan, 2004.
Charles Williams, 2023
Williams’s work sits within the figurative, narrative tradition, but is equally informed by formal concerns of 2D and 3D design. He describes his practice as an unfolding improvisation weaving together narrative, surface and image, drawing on chaotic episodes from his own career, including art-world disappointments and a stint as Louise Bourgeois’s studio assistant. Recent work has moved into the territory of therianthropy. Williams describes his process as a dialogue between himself and the paintings that have taken hold of his imagination, likening the way images and memories surface and recede to Evelyn Waugh’s description of fish circling in a tank before vanishing into the murk.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, Williams is a British artist. A former student at the Royal Academy Schools and a founder member of the notorious Stuckist art movement, he has exhibited in the UK, Europe and the United States. Formerly Programme Director of Fine Art at Canterbury Christ Church University, he was a PhD scholar there between 2018 and 2021, completing an autoethnographic investigation into his painting in 2023. In 2023 he was elected President of the Royal Watercolour Society. He is currently Programme Director of Visual Art HE at Canterbury College.
Williams published ‘Basic Drawing: How to Draw What You See’ in September 2011 and the follow-up, ‘Basic Watercolour’, in July 2014 (Robert Hale, London). He has written a series of articles for Turps magazine, London, on Annibale Carracci, G. D. Tiepolo and Joseph Highmore. Exhibitions include the RA Summer Exhibition, the Hunting Prize, Lynn Painter-Stainers, the Threadneedle Prize, The Marmite Prize and the John Moores. Galleries include Lily Zeligman Gallery, Netherlands; John Martin, London; and Charlie Dutton Gallery, London, with solo shows
Vincent Hawkins, 2024
Hawkins describes himself as someone who can never fully explain his own work, instead watching it unfold over time as though it has little to do with him. Working across canvas, paper, card and wood, his recent practice has been loosely framed around landscape — one body of work shaped by what is underfoot on the beach, another by light — though he insists none of this is intentional, simply something that emerges. He is candid about not knowing exactly why he continues painting, framing it not as a narrative but as an ongoing attempt to respond to the experience of living.
Hawkins was born in Hertfordshire in 1959 and studied painting at Maidstone College of Art, Kent, between 1984 and 1987. He lives in Margate and makes paintings on canvas, paper, card and wood. He has shown extensively in Britain and abroad in group exhibitions, and has had solo shows in Chicago, London and Paris. Hawkins is represented by Sid Motion Gallery, London.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘A Line of Ashes’, TKE Studios, Margate, UK, 2026; ‘Beyond the Walls of One’s Own Making’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2023; and ‘Planet & Satellites’, L’ahah Association, Paris, France, 2023. Notable group exhibitions include ‘Small Is Beautiful, 43rd Edition’, Flowers Gallery, London, 2025; ‘Objects, History, Time’, Vestry St, London, 2025; ‘Spring Show’, TKE Studios, Margate, UK, 2025; ‘The Wall Left Behind’, Cartavetra Gallery, Florence, Italy, 2025; and ‘Lucent’, West Cork, Drogheda, Wexford Arts Centre and Plymouth, Ireland & UK touring exhibition, 2023/24.
Sophie von Hellerman, 2025
Von Hellermann’s paintings evoke the texture of fables and legends, shaped more by her subconscious than by reference to existing images. Her romantic, pastel-toned canvases are often arranged to suggest layered, intersecting narratives. She applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, and her broad washes give the work a sense of weightlessness. Her subject matter draws as readily from current events as from classical mythology and literature, building expansive, imagined worlds that test the boundary between imagination and reality.
Sophie von Hellermann (b. 1975, Munich) received her BFA from the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Moonage’, Pilar Corrias, London, UK, 2025; ‘Poisson de Folie’, Galerie Sardine, Amagansett, New York, USA, 2024; ‘Out of Time’, Pilar Corrias, London, UK, 2022; Schloss Freienwalde, Bad Freienwalde, Germany, 2022 (commission); ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Pilar Corrias, London, UK, 2020; ‘Judgement Day’, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, 2006; and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany, 2006. Selected group exhibitions include ‘Your Mind Is Now an Ocean’, Pilar Corrias, London, UK, 2024; ‘Wild NM’, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 2024; ‘Sirens: Sophie von Hellermann and Anne Ryan’, Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent, UK, 2021 (commission); and ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 2021.
Sophie von Hellermann lives and works in London and Margate, United Kingdom.
Kristen Healy, 2021-25
Healy stepped away from painting for several years during early motherhood before returning to her practice in 2019. Working from her seafront studio, she developed paintings of County Clare, Ireland, based on plein air sketches, photography and memory. Her recent work grows from the same tension between a persistent compulsion to paint and limited available time, drawing on images of leisure observed in Margate or on short family trips. Each painting begins with repeated quick sketches from a photograph before being translated into paint, with the image left free to shift and develop — inevitably absorbing her own impressions while loosely retaining the original shapes and textures.
Kristen Healy was born in London and moved to Margate, Kent, as a child. She graduated with a BA (Hons) from Wolverhampton University in 2003 and subsequently continued to develop her practice in studios in Margate, Brighton, Amsterdam and County Clare, exhibiting regularly in Ireland and the UK. Healy moved back to Margate in 2017, establishing a private seafront studio, and in 2021 founded The Lido Stores, a gallery showcasing contemporary paintings by emerging and mid-career artists. As well as curating much of the exhibition programme, she shows her own paintings and ceramics at The Lido Stores among the work on display
Online only between 2 - 27 August 2026
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