Guto Morgan (b. 1991) is an artist based in Ystrad Meurig, Wales.

His native environment is a system of pressures he continues to navigate. It holds its own memories — of work, silence, hierarchy, and care — and these histories pull on the present in ways that are often felt before they are understood.

Evocative rural structures expose the tensions many communities face: tradition rubbing against modernity, kinship set against individuality, belonging complicated by estrangement. Guto’s personal history reflects these wider dynamics and echoes experiences that reach beyond his own.

His body is the site where these contradictions collide, soften, or break open. Land/ place, lineage, and expectation all leave traces — in posture, in gesture, in the habits that form without permission. He paints these subtle registers because they speak to something larger than biography; they show how place and inherited roles settle into the body, shaping how a person moves, reacts, and processes information.

His aim is not to resolve these tensions but to recognise them, observe them, and let them surface through paint. The work sits in the space between clarity and uncertainty, where the emotional weight of place becomes momentarily visible.

He presented his first solo exhibition, Tir at MOMA Machynlleth in 2023. Here he explored the formal and relational cues of his native, farmed landscape, its industrial, lived past, and socially charged present. Recent exhibitions include group shows such as Y Lle Celf in the National Eisteddfod of Wales, Wrexham (2025), Euro Starz in TICK TACK, Antwerp (2024) and Canaletto: Idyll and Industry at The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (2024).

Guto has exhibited individually and collectively at institutions such as The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and galleries such as Canfas Gallery, Aberteifi and 3812 Gallery London. His work is held in both private and public collections, including The National Library of Wales’s picture collection. In 2019 he was selected for the 2020 RSA: New Contemporaries annual exhibition and in 2020 he was selected for the first Young Welsh Artists annual exhibition at MOMA Machynlleth.

He was awarded the prestigious Heatherwick Studio Residency at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in 2021, shortlisted for the Stephanie Fribourg Prize in 2023 and his work Frayed Roots was selected for the digital Olymp’Arts exhibition by the World Olymp’Arts Council and the Royal College of Art in 2023.

He holds a Master of Arts (RCA) in Painting from the Royal College of Art, and a BA in Fine Art Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art.