Jemma Appleby has won the Charles Wollaston Award at the 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, receiving the £35,000 prize for her charcoal drawing #1300615, currently on view in Gallery VII. The award, established in 1978 with a donation from lecturer and long-standing RA supporter Charles Wollaston and endowed in perpetuity following his death in 1992, is the most prestigious prize the Summer Exhibition offers, given annually to the work judged most distinguished in the show.
Appleby said the recognition came as a complete surprise. She is still taking it in, by her own account. The drawing is characteristic of her practice: minimal, architectural, clean. Her work tends toward spaces that offer very little visual information and yet somehow carry considerable weight, non-narrative interiors that make quiet enquiries of the viewer’s memory and experience of human space. There is a clarifying impulse in the work, a stripping away rather than an accumulation, which gives it an authority that more demonstrative drawing often lacks.
Jemma Appleby 1300615 Drawing Charcoal Catalogue no.1198 Photo Courtesy Royal Academy
Appleby was born in 1987 and graduated from the City and Guilds of London Art School. Her work has been shown in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Colombia, and is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Macaulay Library in Kent. She has exhibited alongside Phyllida Barlow, Rachel Whiteread and Richard Deacon at the Griffin Gallery and has received previous recognition including the Arts Club Prize for Finest Drawing at the National Open Art Competition in 2010. Her recent exhibition The Light in the World is Without a Significant Plan, which showed in Gibraltar, Madrid and London, received considerable critical attention.
The Summer Exhibition has run without interruption since 1769 and remains the world’s largest open-submission contemporary art exhibition, bringing together emerging and established artists across painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, architecture and film. It also raises funds for the RA Schools, which provides a free three-year postgraduate programme.
More than £70,000 in prizes was distributed across the exhibition this year. Lisa Wright received the £10,000 AXA Art Prize UK for In the Night Garden, given for an outstanding work of figurative art. Andrew Sabin won the £10,000 Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture for Big Henge. Harriette Lloyd received the £5,000 British Institution Fund Award for Students for Through, in recognition of excellence across disciplines. The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize was shared between three artists: John Maine RA took the top award of £3,000 for Monument 3, with £1,000 prizes going to Emma Cousin for Teaching/Learning From Each Other and Brian Dawn Chalkley for Ursula’s Garden. Annie Whiles won the £5,000 Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist for The Listening Thing. Jiyoung Pyo received the £5,000 Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting for Bittersweet. The £5,000 Viking Prize for Print went to Olivia Wells for Pulmo 8.
The Summer Exhibition continues at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London.