Tania Kovats

Tania Kovats makes drawings, sculpture, installations and large-scale time-based

projects that explore our experience and understanding of the natural world. While she is perhaps best known for her sculptures and drawings, her work encompasses a range of creative strategies, from map-making to writing, and she is also active as a curator, teacher and author. Kovats’ enduring themes are the experience and understanding of landscape, geological processes, patterns of growth and the intersection of landscape, nature and culture and how art can speak to our critical climate crisis. 

The Last of My Summer Blooms (2023), made with Dahlia flowers from the artist’s garden, evoke not only the inevitable decay in nature and the passing of the seasons, but the passing of Kovats’ own fertility, as she enters the menopause. She writes: ‘The natural dyes of the blooms are released and stain the paper, while the petals merge with the fibres of the paper. As they dry, they are fixed as these beautiful ghost flowers, quiet memorials to the sweet joys and melancholy of late summer. I started to make these works as I became postmenopausal. The works mark the end of my body’s fertility and my menstrual cycle stopping; a clock that has been keeping regular time since I was ten years old.’ 

Kovats studied at Newcastle Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Notable recent solo exhibitions include Museum Beelden am Zee, The Netherlands (2025), Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh (2024), Parafin, London (2023, 2021), Berwick Gymnasium (2019), Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2019), Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester (2016) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014). Important recent group exhibitions include Earthbound, New Art Gallery, Walsall (2024), Planet Ocean, The Box, Plymouth (2024), Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood, Water, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2022), UnNatural History (curated by Invisible Dust), Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, Coventry (2021), Future Knowledge, Modern Art Oxford (2018), Women Power Protest, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (2018) and Vita Vitale, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2015). 

Kovats’ work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council Collection, London, British Council, London, National Maritime Museum, London, Government Art Collection, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and the Speed Museum, Kentucky. Public artworks are permanently installed at the Natural History Museum, London, Government Art Collection at Admiralty House, London, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and the Barbraham Research Campus in Cambridge. Kovats is currently Professor of Drawing and Making at DJCAD, University of Dundee.