Egg tempera on calf vellum: why Soheila Sokhanvari won the 2026 Juda Art Foundation grant

What matters here is the process before the image. Soheila Sokhanvari paints on calf vellum — on processed animal skin, the substrate of medieval scriptures and illuminated manuscripts — grinding her own pigments from raw materials and laying them down in egg tempera, a technique that predates oil painting by centuries. The commitment is not antiquarian. It is a formal argument: that certain political subjects, among them memory, identity and the fractures of cultural displacement, require a medium that carries its own duration. The resulting works evoke the precision of illuminated manuscripts while addressing the opposite of their devotional certainty.

This is the practice that the 2026 David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation has chosen to support with its annual £50,000 grant, awarded to Sokhanvari at a reception at Annely Juda Fine Art’s new gallery at 16 Hanover Square, Mayfair. The grant exists to reduce financial pressure and give the recipient concentrated time in the studio — a practical recognition that certain practices are demanding by nature. Sokhanvari, born in 1964 in Iran and now based in Cambridge as an associate artist at the Wysing Arts Centre, trained first in biochemistry before turning to fine art; the precision of her preparation carries that history.

16 Hanover Square, Mayfair, the new home of Annely Juda Fine Art gallery — 16 Hanover Square, Mayfair — the new gallery. Photo: No Swan So Fine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Her work draws on magic realism, symbolism and allegory rather than documentary register, using these modes to address political and social histories through metaphor. The foundation describes her practice as resisting fixed or authoritarian narratives, and the technique reinforces this: egg tempera dries quickly and will not blend the way oil does, requiring each mark to be placed precisely and without revision. There is no correction, only accumulation. That quality of commitment — the sense that each gesture is made permanently — gives the work its character as witness.

A special second grant of £10,000 was awarded this year to Olivia Sterling, born in 1996, a London-based painter whose vividly coloured and tightly composed works examine race, class, gender and social status through scenes of everyday British life. The shortlist from which both winners emerged was selected by Alyce Mahon, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge, who named seven artists: Laia Abril, Aziza Kadyri, Amak Mahmoodian, Niamh O’Malley, Ro Robertson, Soheila Sokhanvari and Olivia Sterling.

The David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation was established in 2017 by David and Yuko Juda, the founders of Annely Juda Fine Art, one of London’s most enduring galleries for serious international contemporary art. The gallery recently relocated to 16 Hanover Square, Mayfair, and has hosted an exhibition featuring all seven shortlisted artists. That exhibition continues until 19 September.

Tags: Alyce Mahon, Annely Juda Fine Art, David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation, Olivia Sterling, Soheila Sokhanvari, contemporary art grants