Vicky Martin, Artist
AH Magazine Artist Award
Awarded Artists
Selected for the June 2026 issue, the awarded artists were recognised for the strength of their visual language, originality of approach, and relevance within the contemporary context of art and design.
First Prize
Vicky Martin
Staffordshire, United Kingdom
Vicky Martin is an award-winning British photographer with a background in art and design, recognised for her conceptual portraits exploring the female experience through the tension between fantasy and reality. At the heart of her artistic vision are questions of identity, self-perception and the social constructs that shape ideas of womanhood. Through carefully staged scenes, colour, costume and symbolic detail, Vicky creates photographic narratives in which personal strength and vulnerability do not cancel each other out, but inhabit the same emotional space. In her work, the female figure becomes an enigmatic presence, at once strong and fragile, inwardly free yet confronted by the expectations society places upon her. The artist examines the tension between personal autonomy and cultural patterns, revealing how fine the line can be between who a woman is and who she is expected to become. Her photographs have a powerful visual allure, yet beneath their theatrical beauty lies a considered critique of the norms, roles and ideals that shape female identity. Vicky has exhibited and published internationally, from Europe to the United States, and her work is held in the permanent collection of FotoNostrum Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona. The recipient of numerous awards for her practice, she brings together aesthetic precision, psychological depth and a clear artistic commitment to understanding women’s inner lives.
Adam Neuba
Second Prize
Paderborn, Germany
Dr Adam Neuba is a natural scientist, photographer and artist based in Paderborn. Born in Poland, he moved to Germany with his family in 1988. He studied chemistry at the University of Paderborn, where he still works today, and his experience as an experimental chemist has profoundly shaped his photographic language. For more than fifteen years, he has devoted himself to artistic close-up and macro photography, combining scientific precision with a minimalist, almost poetic vision. In his work, the logic of chemistry finds its visual counterpart: just as he creates new bonds at the molecular level, his photographs build unexpected relationships between nature and human-made technology. The Light Walker, Walk Around The World, The Jumper, Spot On! and Lost In Thought draw the viewer into a quiet macroworld, where tiny living creatures, metal surfaces, light and shadow become elements of a carefully staged visual narrative. Neuba uses reduction, clarity of line and precise composition to transform the contrast between the organic and the industrial into a harmonious whole. For him, the photograph is only the first step; through the deliberate digital shaping of light, contrast and atmosphere, each scene is brought to its final artistic form, where nature and technology merge into a new and powerful emotional experience.
Second Prize
Nicola Scognamiglio
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Nicola Scognamiglio is a contemporary artist based in Amsterdam, whose practice unfolds through graphite drawing, photography and sculpture. His architectural training, together with years spent working in cinematic image-making, has sharpened his sensitivity to space, light and the fragile threshold of the visible. In the series Traces, Nicola explores the moment when a thought begins to take form, as an inner state moves from abstraction to tangible presence. For him, graphite becomes a means of recording that passage, a trace of pressure through which latent experience is transformed into form. Adrenochrome, Amor Fati, Idiopsis I, Threshold and Mask bring together the eye, the body, organic fragments and veiled figures within an atmosphere of tension, introspection and precisely controlled unease. Each work carries a sense of revelation, with the image emerging through the smallest shift between inner impulse and material sign. Nicola has presented his work in art programmes held during Art Basel Miami Beach and The Armory Show in New York and is currently completing the Traces series while developing a cycle of marble sculptures devoted to form, existence and the passage from the invisible to the tangible.
Second Prize
Natella Kiseleva
Turkey
Natella Kiseleva is a photographer born in Eastern Siberia, in Transbaikalia, whose artistic eye has been shaped by living and working in more than twelve countries. Her experience of different cultures, languages and visual traditions is clearly reflected in photographs that bring together the sensibilities of East and West, contemporary fashion imagery and a nostalgia for the magazine aesthetics of the 1990s and early 2000s. She came to photography after spending time in front of the camera as a model, an experience that gave her a distinctive understanding of the body, the gaze and the relationship between observer and observed. She approaches each image with an almost directorial sensibility, constructing the frame as a carefully staged scene in which composition, colour and light guide the eye and set the atmosphere. In the works from the series “No Tears”, nature is not merely a backdrop, but a space of silence, touch and inner tension. Body, skin, leaves, tree bark and shadow merge into a visual narrative of vulnerability, presence and emotional restraint. Through scanning and mixed-media interventions, Natella gives the photograph a sense of surface, trace and physical intimacy, moving it away from the immediacy of the digital image. Her work exists at the intersection of fashion, portraiture and fine art photography, creating an intimate visual world in which every detail carries weight.
Third Prize
Anastasiia Lodde
Copenhagen, Denmark
Anastasiia Lodde is a Copenhagen-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, video, object-based work and performance. Before committing fully to art, she studied biology and spent years working in genetics, a background that continues to shape her visual language through ideas of repetition, variation, mutation and inheritance. Her move to Denmark in 2019 prompted a deeper exploration of migration, belonging, disorientation and the rebuilding of a sense of home. The works recognised by the award place the fish at the centre of her symbolic world, as a hybrid figure caught between vulnerability, adaptation and alienation. Newspapers, telephones, tableware, suitcases, urban settings and landscapes transform the everyday into a symbolic terrain, where personal memory meets wider social and political pressures. Her paintings retain visible traces of earlier layers, as though time itself remains inscribed on the surface of the canvas. Through irony, tenderness and quiet tension, Lodde builds a world in which home is not a fixed place, but a fragile bond between body, memory, objects and the spaces that shape us.
Third Prize
Leora Rosner
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Leora Rosner is a photographer born in Manhattan and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, in a home where art, literature, museums, music and ballet shaped her way of seeing from an early age. After studying at two art academies, she developed an independent photographic voice, and following her move to Amsterdam in 1975, she discovered the world of windows as an inexhaustible field of visual exploration. In her series The Finestranaut, she describes herself as a “finestranaut”, an explorer of scenes hidden in glass, deriving the term from the Italian word finestra, meaning window. Her photographs do not simply record the reflection of a building, a tree, or an interior; they capture the moment in which several realities overlap: what lies behind the glass, what stands before it, the space around the photographer, and what returns through reflection. Works such as When hangers dream of a former life, The variability of triplication, The jazz of it all, Swimmers from a bygone age and The descending clouds of ice transform ordinary window surfaces into layered, almost surreal compositions of light, shadow, colour and distortion. She is especially captivated by older panes of glass, whose irregularities bend the image and reveal forms otherwise hidden on polished contemporary surfaces. Each photograph is taken as a single exposure, without digital compositing, using only precise cropping and intensified colour, empowering Rosner to turn everyday windows into scenes of unexpected revelation.
Third Prize
Valerio Villani
Viterbo, Italy
Valerio Villani is an Italian artist, painter and illustrator. Born in Rome, he has lived and worked in Viterbo since 1998, where he studied painting and later completed a master’s degree in computer design. His work brings together contemporary figuration, drawing and illustration, with a focus on the human figure, inner landscapes, vulnerability and quiet emotional states.
He has been selected for art events in Italy and across Europe, including Premio Basilio Cascella, Enegan-Art, Premio Palladio, Geni Comuni and London Calling. In 2019, he won the Premio Palladio for painting. Alongside his artistic practice, he works as an illustrator for publishers, and his work has been featured in international art publications.
In Silence, Rebirth, Il ritorno, La fine and Dreaming, Villani explores the soul as a space of knowledge, memory and self-awareness. His figures become fragile boundaries between the inner and outer world.
For Villani, painting is a place where the human being encounters the deepest part of the self. His visual language opens a space between dream and reality, between intimacy and the world, leaving the viewer with the sense of witnessing not a portrait, but an inner state.
