Meso Ventures and Bulgari Present What Light Remains
Works by Tiyana Mitchell
Opening: Friday, 12 June 2026 | On View: 12 June – 10 July 2026 | Bulgari, 168 New Bond Street, London
Meso Ventures, in partnership with Bulgari, presents What Light Remains — a new body of work by London-based painter Tiyana Mitchell, on view from 12 June to 10 July 2026 at Bulgari's flagship boutique at 168 New Bond Street, London. What Light Remains marks Mitchell's most ambitious presentation to date: a continuation of her archival painting practice that now extends into the material culture of the mid-twentieth century, with the Rolls Royce motor car emerging as a striking and resonant new focal point — and, with it, an expanded geography that travels from the deserts of Jordan to the boulevards of Paris.
Mitchell was born in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2001 and has recently completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. Her practice is rooted in the photographic albums of her late grandfather — a meticulous personal archive spanning the 1920s to 1970s across the Middle East and Europe, assembled by a family whose history touches the highest levels of regional diplomacy. Her great-grandfather served as District Governor of Jerusalem in 1944 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs for Jordan from 1949 to 1952. These albums — her primary source material — are simultaneously intimate family documents and records of a pivotal era in the shaping of the modern world.
What Light Remains retains the quiet, sepia-toned visual language that has defined Mitchell's practice: warm ochres and dissolving golds; suited figures rendered with precision yet stripped of fixed identity; cropped compositions that imply a world larger than the frame allows. Faces remain deliberately dissolved — figures of memory rather than portraits, carriers of history rather than named individuals. In one work, a suited man at a gathering is obscured entirely by a lampshade, the object standing in for the face with an almost surreal plainness. In another, a tweed jacket and the curve of an ear are all that remain of a figure disappearing from view. Cloth — draped, creased, falling — does much of the emotional work across the exhibition, a recurring proxy for the body's presence and absence.
What is new in this body of work is what anchors the horizon. Across the archive, Rolls Royce motor cars appear repeatedly — parked beneath desert rock formations, driven through European capitals, their chrome catching a light that no longer exists. Mitchell has translated this into some of the most formally daring work of her practice to date. In a series of large canvases, the Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament — that silver winged figure — rises into a vast ochre sky above a desert landscape, camels crossing the middle distance. The image is improbable and completely convincing: a totemic object of British manufacture transposed into a Middle Eastern terrain, its reflection shimmering on the bonnet below. The car is not decoration here. It is a coordinate — marking the intersection of colonial luxury, diplomatic prestige, and personal memory that runs through the entire archive.
The exhibition's most overtly cinematic work places a figure at the wheel of an open-top car in Paris, the Eiffel Tower looming in the background and a face — half-seen, eyes closed — caught in the rear-view mirror. The image reads like a still from a film that was never made: a woman in motion, the city framing her, and a man's reflection suspended between looking forward and looking back. It distils everything Mitchell's practice is concerned with — the partial glimpse, the figure on the threshold of recognition, the past visible only in the mirror and only briefly.
The title What Light Remains speaks to Mitchell's central preoccupation: the photograph as a technology of preservation that is also, by nature, a technology of loss. Light captures; light fades. The archive gives and withholds in equal measure. Mitchell does not resolve this tension — she paints from within it, rendering scenes that are both intimately present and irretrievably distant. At Bulgari's New Bond Street flagship — itself a house defined by the meeting of craft, heritage, and material beauty — the works find a context that amplifies their quiet precision.
About the Artist
Tiyana Mitchell
Tiyana Mitchell (b. 2001, Scottsdale, Arizona) is a painter based in London. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2025). Her practice centres on the translation of archival family photography into large-scale paintings — warm, sepia-toned, and deliberately timeless — in which figures dissolve into the pigment and anonymous faces become vessels for intergenerational memory. Drawing on albums built by her grandfather across five decades and three continents, Mitchell's work occupies the charged territory between personal history and political archive, between the known and the irrecoverable.
Her work has been held in the collections of the Ambassador of Jordan's official residence in Washington D.C. and the Four Seasons Mumbai.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition: What Light Remains
Artist: Tiyana Mitchell
Presented by: Meso Ventures and Bulgari
Venue: Bulgari, 168 New Bond Street, Mayfair, London
Opening Night: Friday, 12 June 2026
On View: 12 June – 10 July 2026
Press Contact
Press Enquiries Meso Ventures For press enquiries, interview requests, image requests, and accreditation: Email: art@mesoventures.com Website: www.mesoventures.com Instagram: @mesoventures
About Meso Ventures
Meso Ventures is an international art platform dedicated to fostering cross-cultural exchange through curated exhibitions and artist development. Working across London, Delhi, Mumbai, and beyond, Meso Ventures brings together emerging and established artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, installation, and photography.