Bella Tangieva — Ceramic Artist.
Discovery of the Year 2025.

Every so often an artist appears who makes you rethink when, exactly, an artistic life begins. This year, that artist is Bella Tangieva.

London Arts and Talents names ceramic artist Bella Tangieva its Discovery of the Year 2025 - and is proud to welcome her as an Ambassador of our community.

From 21 May to 20 June 2025, the State Exhibition Gallery of the Republic of Ingushetia gave her a solo exhibition, "Jewelled Porcelain". A full month. One artist. More than two hundred works.

A month. A state gallery. Two hundred works

Consider that number for a moment. Two hundred pieces is not an exhibition assembled to meet a deadline - it cannot be. It is years at the kiln, hundreds of firings, every one of them capable of destroying everything. Ceramics forgives nothing: forms crack, glazes come out the wrong colour, and the kiln always has the last word. Two hundred works in a single hall mean that this artist won her argument with the material two hundred times in a row.

A solo show on that scale, in a state gallery, is something artists work towards for decades. Bella Tangieva spent a quarter of a century getting there.

She came to clay at forty

Bella Tangieva was born in Grozny in 1961. Two degrees, from Moscow and St Petersburg. Years at the St Petersburg Centre for Scientific and Technical Information, followed by a successful career in business. In 1996 her working life was interrupted. In 2001 she turned to clay - and never left the material again.

Ten years later, in 2011, tutors at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design in St Petersburg recommended her to the Academy's courses in ceramics and porcelain: a decade of independent practice meeting the discipline of the Petersburg school. She was fifty.

What followed is usually the work of a lifetime. Coiling, pinching, slab building, sculptural modelling: virtually the entire vocabulary of hand-building. And, separately and seriously, the hardest discipline of all - the colour science of glazes and pigments, the higher mathematics of ceramics, where colour is born not on a palette but in fire. That is what became her signature. Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Romanesque vintage: she moves between eras freely, and not one of those styles reads as a quotation in her hands.

Her work has been shown across regions of Russia and abroad. 2025 was the year everyone found out.

"Jewelled Porcelain"

The title of the exhibition is the key to the work. A jeweller's register, where the millimetre and the exactness of the colour decide everything - detail worked so finely that visitors lean closer to the case than they meant to.

The exhibition's leading characters are flowers and birds: a subject with three centuries of history in European porcelain, one artists return to again and again. In Tangieva's hands it rests entirely on colour. Glaze and pigment do not decorate her forms; they create them. Petals, wings, curves - porcelain in her hands forgets that it is fragile and starts behaving like something alive.

A collector by nature

Collecting came to her before art did. She began her first serious stamp collection at eight, buying stamps with her school money at the Soyuzpechat kiosk near her school. It grew into a substantial collection and was lost in Grozny after the family moved to Leningrad; only later, seeing other philatelists' collections, did she realise what rarities had passed through her hands. A second collection, of postcards, did not survive either.

Today she collects almost exclusively her own work. The result is a substantial body of contemporary art porcelain and ceramics by Bella Tangieva - in effect an artist's own museum, and one that keeps growing.

Why Discovery of the Year

Because an artistic biography, it turns out, has no expiry date.

Because a woman who first took up clay at forty spent a quarter of a century earning a solo exhibition in a state gallery - and arrived not with a dozen objects, but with a collection.

And because her ceramics bring together two things that almost never coexist: the iron discipline of the St Petersburg academic school and an entirely free, fearless hand with colour. It has been a long time since we came across a story like hers.

Ambassador of London Arts and Talents

And the news we are proudest to share: Bella Tangieva has become an Ambassador of London Arts and Talents.

We are delighted that an artist of this stature - and this biography - now represents our community. Artists like her are the reason we do this work, and exhibition projects together lie ahead.

Our congratulations to Bella Tangieva. We are proud to have her with us.

Artist's Instagram: @tangieva_bella1978