Sebastian Alabaster (b. 2005, London) lives and works in London. His practice examines the instability of the contemporary world through systems of entanglement, asking how structures that appear coherent are continually subject to fragmentation and collapse. Working primarily through painting alongside moving image and performance, Alabaster is concerned less with representing instability than with making its conditions perceptible.
His large scale paintings are constructed through processes of accumulation and interruption. Acrylic is applied to marouflage cotton duck canvas before the support itself is divided and reconfigured, fracturing the continuity of the image. Cool aqueous tonalities with shifting densities and disrupted surfaces produce works that hover between material presence and atmospheric depth. In this sense, Alabaster treats the physical construction of the painting as inseparable from the systems he seeks to examine.
This concern extends across his wider practice. Works including Mare Tranquillitatis, Entanglements and Dissection explore the relationship between continuity and fracture, while his moving-image works, including Radiate and the Absence series, approach related questions through disappearance. Performance introduces the body as another unstable element within these interconnected structures. Across these forms, Alabaster's work is characterised by an understanding of instability as a condition through which relationships become visible.
His practice draws upon New Materialist thinking, particularly questions of relationality and interdependence, alongside a sustained engagement with the historical tradition of the Sublime. Alabaster subjects them to material processes allowing his artwork to become an active site of enquiry. The resulting work occupies a space between the intimate and the systemic grounded in the physical encounter with a painting while remaining attentive to the larger structures through which contemporary life is organised.
Alabaster's recent trajectory has brought this investigation into increasingly institutional and public contexts. In 2026 he was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where Mare Tranquillitatis was exhibited and subsequently sold. He co-founded Morisot, an artist-led curatorial and research platform, through which he co-curated Imaginary Possession at Greatorex Street, London, along side artist Gabriel Campbell and curated by Mei Bassett-Chan. The exhibition was subsequently discussed in The Courtauldian, and Alabaster and Campbell presented their practice at the Warburg Institute in conjunction with the Courtauld Fine Art Practice Society. He is the recipient of the Ethereal Maison Residency for the Venice Biennale with his work been subsequently exhibited in Venice during the Biennale and is held in the collection of Southwark Cathedral and in private collections nationally and internationally.