Mia Chaplin (b. 1990; South Africa) is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in Cape Town. Working in oil on canvas and paper, as well as in bronze and plaster sculpture, her highly expressive works are characterised by their rich impasto surfaces and visible brushwork. Her loose style of painting is intuitive, thus heightening the emotion of her pieces. Chaplin’s works are considered subjective impressions of the female experience in relation to themes of sexuality, sensuality, intimacy, and violence.

Since completing her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2011, Chaplin has presented various solo exhibitions including Swamp (2022), Mouth (2018), Under a Boiling River (2017), and Binding Forms (2016), with WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery in Cape Town. Chaplin has completed artist residency programmes at Fountainhead Residency, Miami (2023), where she won the Fountainhead Residency Artist prize, as well as Cité Internationale Des Artes in the Marais district, Paris (2018), Nirox Arts Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016), and at OBRAS Foundation in Alentejo, Portugal (2015).

Consisting of still-lifes, figure studies, and landscapes, her sensual style of painting – synonymous with that of the impressionists – moves between voyeurism and an intimate interaction with her subjects. Her paintings depict blurry impasto compositions of bodies interwoven, often depicted as indistinguishable from one another and unashamed. The limbs and torsos of Chaplin’s painted bodies fracture and overlap across the surface; at times represented only by a swatch of colour. Chaplin conflates this loose style with the odalisques of exotic Romanticism and the Italian Renaissance’s Venuses in pudica pose; the latter era being unattainably hyper-feminine and the former, effortlessly masculine. She uses the varying gendered styles of these eras to portray unconventional feminine subjects intertwined in a natural environment within her paintings.

In 2022, Chaplin presented a solo booth at Artissima in Turin, Italy with WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, South Africa, and a solo booth at Untitled Miami in 2023. Her works have since been included in various group presentations at miart, Milan (2023, 2024), Art Brussels (2024), Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023, 2024), and Art Joburg. Her work has been placed in numerous international private and public collections, including the Spier Arts Trust (South Africa), Lam Museum (The Netherlands), and the Francesca Lavazza Collection (Italy).