After Hours

Meet the artists, experts and models!

YÉGA is a British-Nigerian fashion artist whose client list mirrors the diverse international following her work has garnered. This includes British Vogue, Vogue Arabia, Maison Laduree, Boghossian, Diane Von Furstenberg, Grazia, Fashion Trust Arabia, Jennifer Chamandi and The Dubai Mall. Her blended cultural experience greatly influences her eclectic style, often featuring intricate line work, patterns, bold colour palettes and her favourite subject- the human figure. Working predominantly with fine liner pens and digital colour, she also experiments with watercolours, markers and acrylic paint. In 2020, YÉGA founded Fashion Illustration Africa to encourage knowledge sharing between Western and African illustrators. She also co-founded iLLUSTRA8, an NYC-based talent management agency representing multidisciplinary illustrators from Africa, India and the Middle East.

Alex Mein (b.1981) is an artist and lecturer living and working in London. His work explores identity and portraiture through observational drawings made on paper. He works with sitters in their domestic spaces, often focusing on the way pose and fashion styling suggest an individual’s personality and documenting a shared moment in time between artist and subject. Feelings of empathy, sensuality and intimacy are expressed through an approach informed by his background in fashion and textile design. Rhythmic lines, pattern, mark making and unconventional colours are used to disrupt and interpret the human form. Mein has been featured in publications such as Another Man and Love Magazine, and his clients include Mulberry, Gap and Liberty London. He is the course leader of the BA (Hons) Fashion Imaging and Illustration degree at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts.

Ketty Gottardo studied History of Art at the University of Udine, Italy (Laurea, 1998), and later at The Courtauld (MA 2004, PhD 2012) where her research focused on Baroque prints and drawings. Before joining The Courtauld as Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings (2016), Ketty held positions at the Louvre Museum, Paris, where she worked as a cataloguer of Italian drawings, was assistant curator in the department of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Head of the old master drawings department at Christie’s in Paris, and associate curator of drawings at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Ketty has co-curated with Emeritus Professor David Solkin Fuseli, Fantasy and Fetishism, an exhibition of drawings , which will examine an extremely significant but little-studied aspect of Fuseli’s graphic oeuvre. The subject of the exhibition is Fuseli’s intricate private drawings of modern women, typically shown fashionably dressed in the late eighteenth-century neoclassical manner but with hairstyles that take contemporary modes to highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily elaborate extremes.

The Courtauld National Partners team works with partners to provide unique opportunities for communities across the UK to engage with The Courtauld Gallery’s collection. The programme focuses on The Courtauld’s shared industrial heritage with locations across the UK, including Ashton-under-Lyne, Belfast, Braintree, Coventry, Flintshire, Hull, Preston and Wolverhampton. Inspired by the legacy of Courtaulds Ltd, the textile company that made Samuel Courtauld his fortune, The Courtauld is collaborating with local museums and galleries to develop exhibitions, volunteer led projects and school workshops that engage with young people and communities, to learn more about the history of Samuel Courtauld’s collection and Courtaulds Ltd in their area.

MA History of Art Documenting Fashion students.