Victoria Sills

Victoria Sills is a painter and printmaker working in Essex. Sills read illustration at the University of Brighton and went on to The Other MA in Southend, and is now an associate of that programme.

The practice runs across several disciplines, chiefly paint, print and drawing: oil on wood and on paper, drypoint etching, acrylic on cradled panel and graphite. It is made small and worked close in, built from a narrow range of colour and a run of economical marks held inside a tight picture space, and although it can look spare there is a good deal of feeling in it, reaching for the character and essence of a sitter rather than the likeness alone. The themes are of the present day, mental health among them, and what it is to live in a world of ever-increasing technology. Traditional means are chosen deliberately, out of an interest in putting contemporary art within reach of a broad public.

Sills won the ING Purchase Prize at the ING Discerning Eye in 2025, which brought a solo exhibition at ING in Moorgate, and holds the FiKVA Representation Award of the same year. The work reached the final fifty of the British Art Prize and was a finalist in the D Contemporary open, and has been selected for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize, for the Royal Institute of Oil Painters annual exhibition and for the Society of Women Artists annual open at the Mall Galleries, with shortlistings for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the New English Art Club. A solo show, 'emovere', was held at The Stone Space in Leytonstone. Sills appeared on Sky's 'Portrait Artist of the Year' in 2023.

In the region, the work has been shown at Beecroft Art Gallery, Focal Point Gallery, The Minories and Snape Maltings. Sills has held a year-long residency at Leigh Community Centre with the Leigh Art Trail, an artist residency for Southend Festival, and a group residency at Othona with TOMA, and has taught on the TOMA public space programme, run workshops in local schools and facilitated at Metal Southend. Alongside the paintings and prints, Sills makes short films.