Artists

Gavin Turk is a British born, internationally renowned artist, who lives and works in London. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art.Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Gavin Turk’s work is held within public and private collections worldwide, including but not limited to the TATE, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Musée Magritte Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In 2013 Prestel published Turk’s first monograph, showcasing more than two decades of his work and in 2014 Trolley Books published ‘This Is Not A Book About Gavin Turk’ which playfully explores themes associated with the artist’s work via thirty notable contributors.

Sir Terry Frost was an English painter best known for his geometric abstractions. Overlapping half-circles, rectangles, and squares of bright colors, the artist’s work conveyed his enthusiasm for perceptual phenomena. Born on October 13, 1915, in Leamington Spa, United Kingdom, he served in World War II where he was captured by the Nazi’s as a prisoner of war. Later, as his painting career progressed, he began teaching at institutions such as the University of Leeds and the University of Reading. Frost died on September 1, 2003 in Hayle, United Kingdom. Today, the artist’s works are in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Damien Hirst is a British Conceptual artist known for his controversial take on beauty and found-art objects. Hirst was part of the Young British Artists movement that rose to prominence in the early 1990s. “I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds,” he reflected. “Any artist's big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that's great.” Hirst was raised in Leeds. As a student at Goldsmiths College in London, his work caught the eye of the collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi, who became an early patron. Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)—a large vitrine containing an Australian tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde—was financed by Saatchi and helped to launch the artist’s career. Hirst went on to win the coveted Turner Prize in 1995. In 2012, he showed what went on to be one of his most controversial work in decades, the installation In and Out of Love, which consisted of two white windowless rooms in which over 9,000 butterflies flitted around and died. In 2015 Hirst opened the Newport Street Gallery in London, which grew from his long-term ambition to share his art collection with the public. The artist lives and works in London, United Kingdom. His works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.

Sam Taylor Wood is a contemporary British photographer and filmmaker. Interested in the relationship between identity and appearance, her work examines the contradictions between our interior lives and our exterior presentations of the self. “I wanted to become an artist because it meant endless possibilities,” she explained. “Art was a way of reinventing myself.” Born Samantha Louise “Sam” Taylor-Wood on March 4, 1967 in Croydon, United Kingdom, the artist turned from sculpture to photography and film in the 1990s after graduating from Goldsmiths College, merging a cinematic sensibility with her still images. Part of the Young British Artists group that emerged in the 1990s, she is now best known for her mainstream feature-length films Nowhere Boy (2009) and Fifty Shades of Grey(2015). She was awarded the title of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to British arts and culture in 2011. She currently lives and works with her husband the actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson between Los Angeles, CA and London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, among others.

Stella Vine’s paintings unravel the myth of contemporary celebrity, gender stereotypes and identity. But they also offer an intimate, revealing view of herself, mastering the artist’s technique of looking inwards while looking outwards. It is as if every picture is a self-portrait, even though the face is of someone, anyone, but Stella, and therein lies the unsettling power of her art. Vine rose to household notoriety in 2004 when she sold some works to Charles Saatchi, ‘Hi Paul, can you come over I’m really frightened’ (2003). There followed a series of acclaimed solo shows, most notably a vast exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2007 which spanned her whole career of paintings to date. Stella has scandalised the artworld with paintings that eschew the conventions and revel in their deceptive surface of naivety; paintings, no less, of A-List and Z-List celebrities, instantly recognisable and yet curiously alienated from the tough exterior of fame, suddenly perennially vulnerable, damaged and human. In this conflation of the celebrity hierarchy itself, there is something deeply revealing, both about the fairy-tale of celebrity and about Stella herself. Stella’s feminism is in the way she challenges the constructed stereotype of the female damaged by brutal masculinity. Her women are, like herself, in the grip of an outmoded womanhood, with all its tenderness and terror in a merger of Elizabeth Wurtzel with the Spice Girls. Stella’s feminism is Girl Power and Prozac mixed up with an effort to reclaim the woman in art not as object or muse but as subject and master.

Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her poignant works that mine autobiographical details through a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and neon text.  She is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s seminal works Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998)—her own unmade, messy bed installed at the Tate Gallery—provocatively contributed to feminist discourse with the raw, confessional nature of her art. There should be something revelatory about art,” she reflected. Emin went on to received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Royal Academician and Honorary Doctorate. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.

Sarah Pope was born in Stoke-On-Trent, UK in 1971. Sara Pope left school to study a degree in mathematics. After completing her degree, Sara soon realised that she couldn’t ignore her creative side and moved to Barcelona where she completed a course in graphic design. After several years in Spain, Sara returned to the UK and began working in magazines as a designer and art director. Sara Pope is best known for her seductive paintings and limited edition prints of big, bold and beautiful Celebrity Lips. They pack a thought-provoking pop art punch. Beneath their glamorous gloss there is a hint of disintegration, raising questions about the ideals of beauty and the transience of celebrity culture. Lips have a fascinating attraction for Sara, sexy and seductive, symbols of femininity, yet communicators of language. 

Mike Snelle and James Golding—who make art under the moniker “the Connor Brothers”—juxtapose pin-up style portraits of women with blocks of solid color and deadpan snippets of text. The British artists’ chic, slick paintings and works on paper explore artifice and sensational storytelling, themes that they initially folded into their fictional artist personas: The Connor Brothers at first maintained that they were twin brothers who had escaped from a California cult to start creating art, although they have since shed this fictional backstory. The Connor Brothers have exhibited in London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, and Sydney.

Sculptor Rachel Whiteread is a member of the Young British Artists, and the first female recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize. Whiteread first studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic in England, before concentrating on sculpture while attending the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Whiteread’s meditative, large-scale plaster, rubber, and concrete casts of everyday domestic objects, such as mattresses, staircases, shelves, and doorknobs, allude to traces of human activity, and evoke a sense of contemplation and loss. Whiteread received extensive critical attention for these works throughout the 1990s, winning the Turner Prize in 1993 and a Venice Biennale medal for sculpture in 1997. She has exhibited her work around the world, and has created several public sculptures on commission, most recently a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, and a plinth for London’s Trafalger Square. Whiteread currently lives and works in London.

Antony Micallef’s ‘bubblegum pop’ paintings combine skilled brushwork with references to old masters and graphic design. Dealing with the subject of portraiture in a dark and slightly twisted, Bacon-esque way, human forms are placed in artificial, unnatural environments that are influenced by popular culture in the forms of fashion, music and design.