The RBSA Prize Exhibition 2026 – An Uneasy Barometer of British Art

Turn off the Georgian calm of St Paul’s Square into Brook Street and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists announces itself without ceremony. The RBSA Gallery is no neoclassical temple and no repurposed turbine hall. It is a working artists’ gallery in the Jewellery Quarter, and the society has been based there since 2000. In Galleries 1 and 2 the RBSA Prize Exhibition 2026 shows 135 works by 115 artists, chosen from more than 600 submissions. It runs from 1 to 31 October, and the people who come are not after celebrity names. They want to see what contemporary studio practice looks like away from the metropolitan circuit.

Open submission prizes are hard to stage and harder to review. London’s commercial galleries package work into tidy solo presentations with immaculate theoretical justification. Regional open exhibitions do the opposite. They fling the doors open, put mismatched mediums on crowded walls, and accept some incoherence in return for vitality. That bargain is the reason to go, and it raises a blunt question for any old artists’ society: what is it for in 2026?

Two centuries of civic ambition

The society’s pedigree is stubborn. According to its own history, Samuel Lines, Moses Haughton, Vincent Barber and Charles Barber opened a life drawing academy in Peck Lane in 1809, on ground now occupied by New Street station. The Birmingham Society of Artists followed in 1821, and in 1868 it received its royal charter and the right to use “royal” in its title. Its members and past presidents include Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais, which tells you how seriously Victorian Birmingham took its painters.

That weight matters because the prize is meant to travel light. The biennial RBSA Prize hands the choosing to outsiders: Clare Mullett, Head of Collections at the University of Birmingham; Sarah Priest, Regional Director Midlands at Bonhams; and Robert Wenley, Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The RBSA says Mullett and Priest chose the winners, with Wenley contributing by email. The prizes are £1,000, £500 and £250, plus up to six Highly Commended certificates, and there is a catalogue. The society does not say whether the judging was anonymous, so I will not claim it was.

The friction on the walls

I cannot pretend to a neutral tour here. What follows leans on the RBSA’s own listings and the work the judges singled out, and the gallery is the place to test it against the hang.

The shape of the selection is clear enough from the list. It is wide: acrylic and pen, coloured pencil, oil on wood panel, watercolour, photography, hand-cut paper, jewellery. An open call with 135 places produces that kind of mix, and the risk is obvious. Quiet pieces get drowned by loud neighbours, and a show built on range can read as a pile. Yet that friction is where an open exhibition earns its keep. It refuses the sterile neutrality of the art fair and lets a watercolour and a necklace argue it out.

There is also a question of who gets in. Six hundred submissions for 135 places means roughly four in five were turned away, and a panel of three can only guess at what that rejected majority looked like. Every open prize lives with that. What the visitor gets is the judges’ taste at one remove, filtered again by the hang, and the sensible response is to treat the list as an argument to be tested, not a verdict.

What the prize rewards

Judges who come from a university collection, an auction house and a major teaching museum will show their taste in the winners, and these three did. First Prize went to Vahagn Bagoyan for White City – Toxic Clouds, in acrylic and pen on canvas. The title promises industrial contamination and environmental dread, and the choice says that a topical subject, carried by a serious surface, still impresses a panel of this kind.

Second Prize went to Rose Jones for Moss With Seedlings, in coloured pencil. After Bagoyan’s title it is a deliberate change of scale, a picture that seems to look down at a patch of ground rather than out at a ruined horizon. Third Prize went to Virginia Crompton for Experience I: Dog Bite, in acrylic on stone paper, a title that does not flinch.

The six Highly Commended works are the more telling list, because they cross so many disciplines. James Atkins is commended for Aude Landscape, an oil on wood panel. Rukayat Hassan’s photograph Unmasking The Light Within is the image the RBSA chose for the exhibition page. Lynda Froehlich’s Emerald Twilight Necklace puts jewellery on a prize list in a jewellery quarter, which feels right. Emma Duggan’s watercolour Inside Outside, Lawrence Green RBSA’s drawing Resolve and Clare Pentlow RBSA’s hand-cut paper piece Cyclic Blue complete a list that favours craft across media over a single house style.

One artist from the list: Mi Yan

Among the 115 selected artists is Mi Yan. Her portfolio says she was born in Wuhan, China, in 1999, studied traditional sculpture at Southwest University, and took an MA in Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, after which she worked as a model maker in the film industry. She is now based in London.

Her entry, she told us, is The Wolf’s Odyssey (2026), an oil pastel of 40 × 30 cm. The RBSA’s published list names her as selected but not the work, so the title comes from the artist, and what follows comes from the image she sent rather than from the wall. Two wolves, one black and one tawny, are wrapped around each other on snow. The black wolf stares straight out of the picture. The tawny one, its head tucked under the black wolf’s jaw, looks away to the left. Yan builds the fur in short, layered strokes of orange, violet and blue, so the snow is never simply white. It is hard to say whether the two animals are fighting, guarding each other or just keeping warm, and that doubt is the best thing in it.

She describes her practice as working with painting and drawing to explore identity and belonging through imagined worlds, and her wider work shows what that means. Before I Arrived (2026), in oil paint, coloured pencil and graphite on paper, is not in the Birmingham show. It packs a toy-like orange house, a bathroom and walls of ruled exercise paper full of tiny drawn figures into one crowded room, watched over by huge pencil faces. Next to it the wolves look almost restrained. Work from her 404 Realm series was due to be shown in London on 15 October. In a show this mixed, an artist with that kind of invented-world project is easy to miss, and that is an argument for visiting rather than for trusting a list.

The necessity of the regional prize

Metropolitan commentators like to dismiss regional society exhibitions as provincial holdovers. The RBSA Prize is a fair answer to that. Without institutions of its kind, visual culture narrows toward commercial galleries, wealthy patrons and funding bodies fond of safe themes.

The RBSA offers something rougher and broader: a gallery where established members, a jeweller, an environmental painter and a recent graduate can all be on the same list, with an outside panel doing the choosing. The 2026 exhibition is crowded and uneven, and the evidence I have is a prize list and a catalogue, not a long afternoon in the rooms. Even so, a society that is more than two hundred years old is still putting new names in front of a public, in the Jewellery Quarter and not in London. That counts for something, and it is worth more to the artists on the list than a London postcode would be. A first prize of £1,000 will not change a career, but a certificate, a catalogue entry and a month on a Jewellery Quarter wall give an artist outside the capital something concrete to point to.