Selected by Sir Gabriele Finaldi, David Dawson, Philip Mould OBE and Viscountess Bridgeman CBE from a pool of over 300 applicants, this year’s ACS Studio Prize has been awarded to Royal College of Art graduate Alexander Koch.⁣
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Koch, an Italian Dutch visual artist based in London, holds a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2022) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2026). Koch’s practice fuses elements of past and future by transforming memories, dreams, and speculative ideas into vivid contemporary compositions. ⁣
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The artist writes: “Through engaging with painting, I try to use memory (the past), dreams and ideas (the future) in order to activate something in the present. Searching for a personal truth, something honest […] I believe painting is more than just a picture, and through the use of the paint, through finding new ways for the works to be shown, primed or generally constructed, there is the potential to create the right conditions for these [stories] to be told.”⁣

Read more about the ACS Studio Prize and this year’s finalists here.