01What unites the new contemporary British painters
Part of my career was spent in London, and I still follow British painting closely. The new generation of contemporary British painters is not a school. They do not share a manifesto or a single style. What they share, as I see it, is a confident commitment to painting and a deep literacy in its history.
The generation that came to prominence before them was defined largely by objects, installation and provocation. This one is quieter and, to my eye, more rigorous about the medium itself. The nine painters below are the ones I think collectors should know.
It helps that Britain packs art schools, public institutions and commercial galleries into a small geography. Painters see one another's work constantly, and that conversation is visible in the paintings. It makes British painting unusually rewarding to follow as a group, even though every artist here would resist being grouped.
I also find these painters easier to understand alongside the history they draw on. London's public collections make that easy, and I encourage collectors visiting the city to spend as much time in the museums as in the galleries.
Abstraction under pressure: Jadé Fadojutimi and Rachel Jones
Jadé Fadojutimi paints dense, high-speed abstraction concerned with identity and emotional weather. The canvases feel as though they were made in a single breath, though their complexity suggests otherwise. They need space and distance on a wall, and I plan for that. The density that makes them thrilling up close needs room to resolve from further away.
Rachel Jones works in oil pastel, organising her abstraction around teeth and mouths as a site of interiority. Oil pastel gives her colour a density that is hard to photograph, and the works reward close looking. Pastel surfaces can be vulnerable to abrasion, so I ask about framing and handling early.
Both painters show why abstraction in Britain right now feels personal, bodily and emotionally direct without becoming illustration. For a collector, that makes the work easy to love and demanding to place. It needs a wall where it is not competing with anything else.
Working through art history
Flora Yukhnovich dissolves Rococo painting into near-abstraction, putting Fragonard through a contemporary filter. The pleasure of the works is real, but so is the argument about taste, femininity and ornament running underneath. The comparison with Fragonard is useful only as a way in; the paintings stand up without it.
Louise Giovanelli crops and repeats fragments such as hair, curtains and glassware into devotional close-ups. Her repetition feels closer to devotion than to quotation; the fragment becomes the whole.
Sahara Longe paints portraits and interiors in a simplified, Sienese-influenced register. The simplification is hard won. The flatness is a decision, and it gives the paintings a stillness that suits a quiet room.
All three treat older painting not as a quotation to show off but as a set of tools still in use. For collectors, that makes their work easy to live alongside historical pictures, and I often suggest it for exactly that kind of wall.
The figure on its own terms
Somaya Critchlow makes small, intense paintings of Black female figures asserting their own terms. The scale is intimate, and the figures hold the viewer at exactly the distance they choose. The paintings are small but not modest, and they need to hang where they can be approached closely.
Caroline Walker paints women at work, including cleaners, nurses and mothers, with sustained observational precision. Her paintings make labour that usually goes unseen into the main subject, and I think they are among the clearest examples in current painting of observation used as an ethical position.
Antonia Showering paints half-remembered figures and landscapes pulled from family history, where memory softens the edges of everything. Of the three, hers is the work that most rewards a quiet room.
What links all three is a refusal of spectacle. None of them paints the figure to impress. Each paints it to be understood on its own terms, and that is a large part of why I think the work will last.
Issy Wood and the uneasy object
Issy Wood, who is American-British, paints car interiors, china and clothing, often on velvet, with a slowed, uneasy touch. The objects are ordinary; the feeling is not. Velvet also changes how a painting takes light, which is part of the effect.
As I read the work, it makes the viewer uneasy about wanting things. The objects she paints are the kind people desire, and the paintings make that desire feel slightly suspect.
It is a support that needs care. Velvet holds dust and marks easily, so I discuss glazing, cleaning and handling with a client before the work arrives.
How I approach collecting British painting now
Demand for young British painters can move faster than their careers, and the discipline I apply anywhere applies here too. Several of these painters are still early in their careers, so the primary market is where most serious collecting happens, and a collector's reputation for behaving well matters a great deal.
There are also practical points particular to buying from the United Kingdom. Buying in pounds sterling means the final cost depends on the exchange rate at the time of payment, so I confirm the invoice currency before anything is agreed. The rest are on the list below.
- Look at the full development of a practice, including early small works and drawings, before judging a single painting
- Buy on the primary market where possible, and respect a gallery's reasons for placing work where it does
- Plan shipping, import paperwork and any taxes with a specialist shipper and adviser before agreeing a purchase from London
- Ask whether the UK's artist's resale right could apply if you ever resell a work there, and factor it in
- Check how unusual supports, such as velvet or oil pastel, have been stored and framed
- Give the artist time, because every painter here is still early in a career that could run for decades
