A.R. Penck (1939 – 2017) was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and jazz drummer. A Neo-Expressionist, his best-known works were famed for their neo-primitive style and typified by their simplified figures and forms, which Penck referred to as ‘Standart.’
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including MoMA, New York, the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In 2019, his estate donated 'Untitled (Standart)' (1967 bis 1968) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Renowned for his wild brushwork and idiosyncratic style, Albert Oehlen redefined painting at a critical moment in its history. A contemporary of Martin Kippenberger, he rose to prominence in 1980s Cologne as part the loose avant-garde cohort known as the ‘Junge Wilde’ (‘Young Wild Ones’). Raucous and irreverent, these artists championed an approach that they described as ‘bad painting’. Fusing genres, colours, media and techniques with riotous abandon, Oehlen’s works rail against aesthetic convention, opening up new possibilities for art-making in the process. Known for his thrilling abstract works, as well as his Grey Paintings, Computer Paintings and other major series, he proved deeply influential to a younger generation of artists. His work continues to push boundaries today.
Born in Krefeld, Germany in 1954, Oehlen studied under Sigmar Polke at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Hamburg. He has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, the Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Kunsthalle Zürich, with more recent shows at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
Alex Prager is an American photographer and filmmaker. Her elaborately staged images aim to capture some of the surreal, expressing something that exists between fiction and reality, referencing Hollywood cinema, experimental films, pop culture and street photography.
Prager has had numerous international solo shows organised by her gallery representative, Lehmann Maupin. Her work has been exhibited in museums such as Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia and The Photographers’ Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the FOAM Paul Huf Award (2012), The Vevey International Photography Award (2009), and the London Photographic Award (2006). Her editorial work has also been featured in several prominent publications, including Vogue and New York Magazine.
In 2021, Art of Wishes acquired 'Eva' (2009) for auction, courtesy of David and Sayoko Teitelbaum. Prager, along with Lehmann Maupin, also donated an edition of 'Ian (After Philip Lorca diCorcia)' (2016) to Art of Wishes in 2019.
Portrait of Alex Prager, Photo by Christopher Michel, Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
Alfredo Jaar is a renowned artist, architect, and filmmaker, whose career-long investigation into the politics of the image is revealed as ever-more pertinent to our contemporary time. Preferencing that which has been sidelined or obscured, not least those countries in the Americas so consistently obscured by their northern neighbour, Jaar engages with the injustices of recent history. Above all, Jaar’s work considers the dynamics of power, and the power wielded through image.
Jaar’s work resides in notable collections across the globe, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and M+, Hong Kong. Jaar has realised some seventy public interventions around the world. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the Hiroshima Art Prize and Hasselblad Award. Recent major solo exhibitions include those at the SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.
Jaar was born in 1956; he lives and works in New York.
Alison Watt (b.1965) is a Scottish artist known mostly for her portrait paintings.
Famous for winning the National Portrait Gallery’s John Player Portrait Award while still a student, her best-known works often depict the female nude. More recently she has turned to still life, asking how the two styles can interact with one another by looking for narratives within everyday objects.
She has had several solo exhibitions at places such as the National Gallery, London (where she was also appointed an Associate Artist), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. In 2008, she was awarded an OBE, and later in 2017, was appointed a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is represented by Parafin.
Alongside Parafin, she donated 'Stem' (2020) for auction to the Art of Wishes in 2021.
Portrait of Alison Watt, photo by John McKenzie.
Amy Sherald’s practice attends to the diverse African American experience in the United States. Looking to the history of photography and portraiture, she generates a visual dialogue around registers of representation. Sherald is particularly known for her use of grayscale to paint skin tones as a means of upending associations between race and skin colour. Michelle Obama selected Sherald to create her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery; from 2021 to 2022, First Lady Michelle Obama was part of the touring exhibition The Obama Portraits, which showed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, among others.
Sherald was born in Columbus, GA, and now lives in the Greater New York Area. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In 2019, she was awarded the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award and her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
André Butzer (b.1973) is a German artist whose work is characterised by his fusion of European Expressionism with wider pop culture, alongside his explosive use of colour.
His work features in several public collections including; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museuo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany. He is represented by Max Hetzler.
Butzer, along with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin / Paris / London, donated 'Untitled' (2021) for the 2021 Art of Wishes Silent Auction.
Andrew Pierre Hart is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose works focus on the relationship between paint and sound. He describes his practice as ‘an ongoing rhythmic research’, playing with ‘improvised and spontaneous generative processes’. Before taking up art, Hart ran a record label specialising in experimental and techno music. Across
his practice, which also include video, performance, photography and installation, he explores the perception and representation of sonic phenomena. He plays with paint like a musician playing an instrument, infusing his marks with rhythmic vitality.
Hart studied at Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal College of Art, London. He has exhibited his work globally, notably featuring in the celebrated group show Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2021, as well as exhibiting at the Palazzo Barbaro in conjunction with the 2022 Venice Biennale. He has been commissioned to create a new installation for the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2024. Hart is also the recipient of the ArtAngel ‘Thinking Time’ Award (2020) and the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2019).
Angel Otero (b.1981) is a Puerto-Rican multi-media artist, whose work incorporates paintings, collages and sculptural projects. Often employing various methods of collage, much of his work discusses ideas of memory, archives and identity. He is directly influenced by his personal and family narratives, alongside the gestures of painters such as Nicolas Poussin, Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning.
Represented by Lehmann Maupin, Otero has exhibited internationally, and has work represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; DePaul University Museum, Chicago, IL; and Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey. He is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts.
In 2017, Art of Wishes acquired 'The Queen’s Dreams' (2016) for auction at its inaugural Gala, courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
Portrait of Angel Otero, Photo by William Laird, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is a British-Indian sculptor, mainly famed for his installation art. Originally exhibiting as part of the New British Sculpture art scene, he has had many solo exhibitions worldwide, including at the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain and the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, New York and Berlin. His 2009 show at the Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom was, at the time, the most successful exhibition ever held by a living artist in the city.
He has won many prizes, including and the Premio Duemila Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1990 the Turner Prize the following year. Notable works include ArcelorMittal Orbit, (2012) and Cloud Gate (2006).
In recognition of his work, he has been rewarded with the Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government, a knighthood in 2013 for his services to visual arts, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford (2014).
He donated an Edition of 'Omo' (2019) to Art of Wishes in 2021.
Portrait of Anish Kapoor, © Peter Lindbergh
Working at the genre-collapsing intersection of portraiture, landscape, and still-life, Anj Smith’s striking and intricately detailed canvases are charged with themes of gender, ecology, and eroticism. Smith’s labyrinthine compositions transport the viewer into a transcendental realm steeped in urgent contemporary concerns yet underlined by a Bosch-like and timeless formal patina.
Smith was born in 1978 in Kent, UK. Smith’s work is held in many leading public collections, including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Recent museum presentations include those at the New Art Gallery, Walsall and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan. Smith studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths College, London; she lives and works in London.
Annie Morris (b.1978) is a British sculptor, most known for her ongoing series of ‘Stack’ sculptures, Morris’ way of representing childbirth and fragility. She has also been involved in several fashion projects, being commissioned by Burberry in 2006 to construct a dress from clothes pegs.
She has been the subject of several solo exhibitions internationally, with work showing at The Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom, the Tate Gallery, St Ives, United Kingdom and Timothy Taylor, New York, NY.
In 2019, she donated an edition of 'Stack 8, Viridian Green' (2019) to Art of Wishes. The next year, she created and donated one hundred limited edition prints of 'Two Hills' to the charity.
Portrait of Annie Morris in her studio, Photo by Idris Khan, Courtesy of Annie Morris.
Bharti Kher (b. 1969) is an Indian-based contemporary artist, known for her sculptures which explore hybridised forms, exploring the distinction between humans and nature.
Kher consistently uses found objects in her practice, thus, assembling and transforming are key aspects of her work. Another signature of the artist is her use of the bindi, first appearing in 1995.
She has had several solo exhibitions worldwide and is represented by Hauser & Wirth. She has won numerous awards, including the ARKEN Art Prize in 2010 and the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015.
Art of Wishes acquired 'Dreamcatcher' (2018) for auction in 2019, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery.
Brendan Dawes (b.1966) is a British artist who works with generative systems, using data, machine learning and code in his work. He primarily creates NFTs. He is represented by Gazelli Art House and has had work exhibited in shows at MoMA, Somerset House and the Sundance Film Festival.
In 2021, Make-A-Wish UK granted its 15,000th wish — a significant milestone, after the coronavirus forced a year of postponements and cancelled wishes.
Art of Wishes commissioned Dawes to create '15,000 Wishes' (2021) an NFT that features 15,000 colourful strands, each representing a child’s wish. Hope, possibility, beauty derived from chaos, the restoration of childhood and a change from the norm are the themes that run through every strand.
Portrait of Brendan Dawes, Courtesy of Gazelli Art House
Brian Calvin (b.1969) is an American painter, celebrated for his figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style. His portraits are highly stylized and strongly composed, often extremely vibrant in colour, influenced by the Californian natives of his youth. Although his portraits are not based on real people, Calvin is interested in the construction of identity.
He has exhibited internationally and is represented by Almine Rech.
In 2017, alongside Almine Rech, he donated 'New Morning' (2014) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Portrait of Brian Calvin, © Brian Calvin - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Carolyn Djanogly is a celebrated portrait photographer whose work has documented many of the leading figures of our time with striking clarity and formal gravitas. Turning her lens to prominent politicians, leading actors, musicians and artists, as well as corporate changemakers and social innovators, Djanogly’s subjects form a cross-section of history in formation.
Djanogly was born in 1965. Following an earlier career as a BBC researcher and Granada TV documentary director, Djanogly achieved widespread critical acclaim for her first book of photography, Centurions, published in 1999 by Andre Deutsch.
Some twenty-two images from this publication, which depicted some of the most significant figures of twentieth century Britain, were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Djanogly’s photography has appeared in a wide range of international publications, such as Vanity Fair, The Times, Forbes and Der Spiegel, and she has exhibited widely throughout the UK.
Chantal Joffe (b.1969) is an American-born English painter and recipient of the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award from the Royal Academy.
She often paints large-scale portraits of women and children in intimate and animated ways.
Represented by Victoria Miro, Joffe has shown in numerous locations, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, Whitechapel Gallery, London, National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland, Jewish Museum, New York and Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom. She was commissioned for a new public work for the Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel, opening in 2022.
Alongside Victoria Miro Gallery, Joffe donated 'Esme with the Rainbow Umbrella' (2017) to Art of Wishes in 2021.
Portrait of Chantal Joffe, Photo © Thierry Bal. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
Claire Tabouret’s paintings and prints investigate notions of representation, recollection, and the ways in which relationships are constituted. Tabouret is particularly fascinated by ideas around identity, and intimacy and she draws inspiration from magazine photographs, textbooks, and snapshot imagery. These she transforms using a vibrant palette and loose brushwork to create diaphanous veils of Day-Glo colour. Her compositions rarely function as fixed likenesses but instead serve as fluctuating entities which evolve in time.
Born in France, Tabouret studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work is held in Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal, among other public collections. Tabouret has had recent solo presentations at the Musée Picasso, Paris, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; her exhibition I am spacious, singing flesh was a collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Known for her expressive, inflated figures executed in oil on canvas, Cristina BanBan’s work takes as muse the female form, presenting bold yet intimate compositions which speak to women’s everyday experience of companionship, humour and self-definition. While drawing on inspirations ranging from Neoclassical portraiture to Abstract Expressionism and the graphic language of manga, BanBan conceives of her work in ultimately diaristic terms. Deeply invested in the qualities of her medium, BanBan combines such emotive exploration with investigations of the haptic, sensational qualities of paint.
BanBan was born in 1987 in Barcelona. Recent solo exhibitions of BanBan’s work have been held across Japan, the US, China, France, Germany, and Britain. Her work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition The Echo of Picasso at The Museo Picasso, Málaga, opening this autumn. Her work is held in collections including the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Perez Art Museum, Miami. She was the 2021 artist in residence at the Palazzo Monti, and recipient of the 2017 Arts Club Prize from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. BanBan lives and works in Brooklyn.
Dan Colen (b. 1979) is an American multi-media artist. Often moving between diverse styles and subjects, his work consistently investigates ideas of materiality and mark-making. This can be seen in his paintings, which incorporate disused objects, such as chewing gum, flowers and trash, and in his time-based, three-dimensional sculptures and performances.
Represented by Gagosian, he has been exhibited extensively and has work represented in the Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway.
In 2017, he, alongside Gagosian, donated 'Attempted Assassination' (2013) to Art of Wishes.
Danny Fox’s large-scale canvases present prescient portraits of the twenty-first century. Self-taught, Fox has developed his practice across Cornwall, London and Los Angeles; in the latter, Fox worked alongside his contemporary Henry Taylor, a notable influence.
Through muted tones yet with a distinct painterly flair, Fox’s body of work embodies a vast spectrum of human experience and feeling. Deeply aware of the art historical cannon, with each canvas Fox presents unlikely heroes as protagonists in a subversive and moving visual history of our time.
Work by Fox is held in permanent collection by the Start Museum, Shanghai and the Denver Museum, Denver. Recent solo exhibitions of Fox’s work have been held across Britain, the US, Denmark, Germany and Luxembourg. Fox was the 2017 artist in residence at the Porthmeor Artist Residency Programme, St Ives. Fox was born in 1986 in Cornwall, where, following periods in the UK and Los Angeles, he lives and works today.
David Kassman (b. 1971) is an Israeli photographer, known for his extensive travel photography. Embarking on journeys all over the world, into rural and urban communities alike, he photographs the people and places he encounters. His work comments on identity and cultural displacement.
He teaches photography at the Shenkar University of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel, and his work has been exhibited worldwide.
In 2019 he donated ''The Spider-Man Project’ Gizza Pyramid' (2010) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Deborah Azzopardi’s exuberant, playful Pop style has remained consistent across a decades-long career. Enthralled by the everyday, Azzopardi is constantly in dialogue with notable figures of the US Pop movement, while offering more subtle references to the art historical cannon and figures such as Manet, Bouchet or Fragonard. Presenting a distinctively British counterpart to the work of Pop luminaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, a quick witted and tongue-in-cheek British sense of humour is ever-present in Azzopardi’s distinctive visual language. In each work, Azzopardi presents liberatory snapshots of womanhood through a bold, celebratory command of colour and line.
Azzopardi was born in 1958 in London. Numerous solo exhibitions of her work have been held across the US and Britain, including the largescale gallery retrospective 35 Years of Azzopardi staged in 2020 by the Cynthia Corbett Gallery, which has represented the artist internationally for many years. Azzopardi originals and limited-edition prints are found in numerous international collections. Azzopardi lives and works in London.
Do Ho Sun (b.1962) is a Korean sculptor, installation artist, painter and filmmaker, who explores the concept of space and the home. He is particularly noted for his references to real-life experiences; the homes he has lived in and the people he meets often inspire his work.
Internationally renowned, he has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, Towada Art Centre, Towada, Japan and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. In 2013, he was named Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Innovator of the Year in Art. He is represented by Lehmann Maupin.
In 2021, alongside Victoria Miro Gallery, he donated 'Family Cuddle' (2019) to the Art of Wishes.
Portrait of Do Ho Suh, Photo © Daniel Dorsa. Courtey the artist and Victoria Miro
Donald Moffett (b. 1955) is an American artist and activist, first emerging in the late 80s. Moffett attempts to challenge the traditional flat frame of the painting by utilising non-conventional techniques, creating new forms in the process.
Represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Moffett has been the subject of a number of solo shows. His work is also part of several national public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, MoMa, New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.
In 2019, Art of Wishes acquired 'Hidden Drive' (2018) for auction, courtesy of the artist and Marianna Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Portrait of Donald Moffett, Photo by Gayle Brown
Edmund de Waal CBE is a world-renowned potter and writer. Known for his poetic arrangements of porcelain vessels within minimalist vitrines, the artist returns to the subjects of history, memory, and diaspora throughout his work. Drawn to the deeply tactile nature of his medium, de Waal considers the capacity for objects to tell stories, to accumulate the traces and residues of provenance like patina. Rhythmic and deeply lyrical, his compositions of ethereal fragments—porcelain, gold, silver, alabaster, steel and lead—are meditations on literature, music, poetry, and place.
De Waal was born in 1964 in Nottingham. He has exhibited works in museums and galleries worldwide, such as the British Museum, London; The Jewish Museum, New York; and Royal Academy of Arts, London. In 2019 he became the first contemporary artist invited to display his works at the Frick Collection, New York, and his iconic installation Signs & Wonders is a permanent fixture at the V&A Museum, London.
His memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance became an international bestseller after its publication in 2010, winning the Costa Book Award for Biography, and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Price. In 2021, the artist was awarded CBE for his contribution to ceramics and the arts.
Eric Doeringer (b. 1974) is an American artist, who is known for his ‘Bootleg’ paintings and his larger, faithful recreations of works by conceptual artists, including On Kawara, Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt.
He has had several exhibitions worldwide and is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
He, alongside A Hug From The Art World, donated 'Lucio Fontana' (2019) to Art of Wishes for auction at their charity Gala in 2019.
Erika Verzutti engages above all with the shifting relations between media and image. Highly literate in the art historical canon, Verzutti consumes and introduces disparate historical and contemporary motifs in line with the principle of anthropophagy advocated by the Brazilian poet and novelist Oswald de Andrade. Verzutti creates humorous, playful objects forged from bronze, concrete, clay and papier-mâché, and finished with a variety of paint media including oil, pigmented wax and watercolour.
She draws on the intrinsic qualities of her media while simultaneously responding to her contemporary visual culture. Through a negation of material hierarchy, and the introduction of recognisable motifs in surprising and organic ways, Verzutti’s is an ever- evolving artistic practice.
Verzutti was born in 1971 in Sao Paulo. Verzutti’s work is held in collection by museums across the US, Latin America and Europe, including Tate, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, France, and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions of Verzutti’s work include those held at the Centre Pompidou, France; MASP, Sao Paulo, and, forthcoming, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Milan. Verzutti lives and works in Brussels.
Erwin Wurm’s extensive career is marked by a fiercely singular sense of humour and acute social conscience. Directing our gaze towards the joyful absurd, Wurm pushes the boundaries of his medium in order to rally against the contours of an ever-constricting world. Whether through One Minute Sculptures, Flat Sculptures – nominally traditional oil on canvas – or ceramics which take surprising and often jarring forms, over a significant and remarkable career Wurm has undoubtedly expanded the purview of sculpture to meet the contemporary moment.
Born in 1954, Wurm lives in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. Wurm’s work is found in public collections across the world, including Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, to name only a few. In 2023 alone, solo exhibitions of Wurm’s work have been presented at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; the Peter Marino Art Foundation, New York, and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. In 2017 Wurm represented Austria at the 57th Venice Biennale
Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) is a German painter and sculptor. Regarded as a pioneering German post-war artist, Baselitz embraces German Expressionism, recentring the human subject in German painting. Informed greatly by his upbringing in East Germany during the war, destruction and fragmentation play a focal point in his oeuvre: he once stated "I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn't want to re-establish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be 'naive', to start again.” The artist’s work has often been the subject of much controversy and fame.
Training initially at the Hochschule für Bilende und Angewandte Kunst in East Berlin, from which he was expelled in 1957 for “sociopolitical immaturity’, he completed postgraduate studies in West Berlin and changed his name to Baselitz. Inspired by the German Expressionists amongst a wider variety of formal and art historical references, Baselitz’s signature paintings display inverted subjects; upside-down figures, landscapes and still lifes appear in abundance. He is represented by Gagosian.
In 2021, Art of Wishes acquired 'Schlafzimer' (2011) for auction at its third gala, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Gideon Rubin’s paintings are peopled with figures culled from our shared cultural memory; lifted from film stills and vintage magazines, flea markets and second- hand books, Rubin depicts fragmentary glimpses of figures both deeply familiar and intrinsically unknowable. Demonstrating a remarkable command of chromatics and evident love for the materiality of paint itself, the faces of Rubin’s distinctive solitary figures are intentionally blurred, or shielded from the viewer. Anonymity slips into intimacy through an evocation of someone the viewer might know. At once timeless yet speaking to the relentlessness of time - the ways in which it morphs and repeats itself, the way the past seeps into the present - Rubin’s canvases revel in the challenge and possibility of the unfinished.
Rubin holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a MFA from the Slade School of Art, London. He was the recipient of the ‘Shifting Foundation’ grant in 2014, and his work has been presented in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. Rubin’s work is held by important collections across the UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and Israel. Born in Tel Aviv, Rubin lives and works in London.
Gillian Wearing CBE (b.1963) is an English conceptual artist, famed as one of the Young British Artists. Her work is known for its documentation of everyday life through photography and video, where she questions the blurred lines between public and private spaces, individual and mass identities and reality and fiction.
After winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, Wearing was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, United Kingdom in 2007. A retrospective of her work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY.
In 2017, Wearing was commissioned to create a work inspired by Amy, a fifteen-year-old girl living with leukaemia. Amy’s wish was to go to the Royal Ballet School in London; Wearing drew 'Me as Margot' (2017) to commemorate this. She, along with Maureen Paley donated the work for auction to Art of Wishes.
Portrait of Gillian Wearing, © Gillian Wearing
Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) paints iconic, larger than life characters that tell honest stories which are in equal parts revealing and introspective. Like a psychological archive of daily activities, Weaver’s work mainly chronicles female experiences, in both the private and public realm. Communicating themes of the mundane, the melancholic and the emotional, Weaver takes that which is personal, transforming it into universally recognisable visual narratives.
Made during a residency in Marfa, Texas, Untitled (Head), shows a portrait head superimposed over a harlequined background, a layering which grants an architectural sense of structure in cornflower blue and dirtied white. Weaver coats the canvas in layers of oil paint, an additive process whereby paint is applied wet-into-wet. This application exposes both the process and gesture of her painterly practice – marks and omissions remain, rendered by the gestural swoop of a brush, and in textural spikes of paint.
Harold Ancart (b.1980) is a Belgian artist, who works with paintings, sculptured and installations, exploring the experience of natural landscapes versus built environments.
Represented by David Zwirner, he is participating in the Whitney Biennial for 2022. His works are included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions worldwide, including the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has also exhibited both nationally and internationally.
In 2019, alongside David Zwirner, he donated Untitled (2018) to the Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Ian Kiaer (b.1971) is a British sculptor and painter whose central interest is repurposing. Often springing from specific questions relating to art, architecture, philosophy, and social theory, his installations consistently create fragmented narratives, exploring notions of totality and permanence.
He is a Tutorial Fellow in Fine Art at Brasenose College, Oxford and Associate Professor of Fine Art at the Ruskin, University of Oxford. He has exhibited several solo exhibitions internationally, including at the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, the Watarium Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, and the Venice Biennale. He is represented by Alison Jacques Gallery.
In 2019, Kiaer, alongside Alison Jacques Gallery, donated 'Quick City, (Red Cloth)' (2018) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Ida Ekblad (b.1980) is a Norwegian artist, whose practice extends across painting, sculpture, performance and filmmaking. She is influenced by numerous movements and references, ranging from Situationism and Abstract Expressionism to pop culture, graffiti and cartoons.
She has exhibited internationally, including at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico, The National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, Oslo, Norway and Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France. She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler.
In 2019, Art of Wishes received 'Not Yet Titled' (2018) for auction, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris, London.
Idris Khan (b.1979) is a British multi-media artist, working across sculpture, painting and photography. His work often interrogates memory, creativity and the layer of experience, drawing inspiration from historical art traditions, music, and key philosophical and theological texts.
His large-scale works often use the technique of layering, as Khan attempts to create something new through repetition and superimposition. Represented by Victoria Miro, he has exhibited extensively. In 2017 he received an OBE for his services to the arts.
In 2017, he was commissioned by Art of Wishes to create a unique artwork inspired by a child’s wish. Khan, moved by three-year-old Matthew’s wish to be an astronaut, created 'A Wish for Moon, Stars and Planets' (2017) and donated the piece, along with Victoria Miro Gallery, to Art of Wishes for auction. He later created and donated one hundred limited edition prints of 'Long Live Love.'
Portrait of Idris Khan, Photo © Josh Shinner. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
British artist Jadé Fadojutimi is celebrated for her rich, sensory abstract practice. Driven by a love of colour, she draws inspiration from fashion, anime and childhood memories, as well as the work of artists such as Amy Sillman and Phoebe Unwin. Fadojutimi views art-making as a deeply personal act, requiring a state of heightened sensory awareness. Often working late at night, she surrounds herself with visual stimuli, paying close attention to her feelings, memories and impulses. Organic forms and gestures begin to arise, evolving across the canvas like characters.
Fadojutimi studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art. Over the last five years she has taken her place at the forefront of her generation. In 2021 she became the youngest artist to have a work acquired by the Tate, and mounted her first major institutional solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami that year. She participated in the 2022 Venice Biennale to great acclaim, followed by a solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, where another of her works is held.
James Ame (Ame72) is an American graffiti artist who has street works around the world, from New York to London to Tel Aviv. Most known for his use of iconic Lego figures, Ame has developed a distinct style that mixes Pop Art with Urban and Contemporary styles.
In 2019, he donated 'Lego Graffer' (2019) for auction.
James Turrell (b.1943) is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. What he terms perceptual art, Turrell has extensively interrogated the materiality of light within his work, building on the sensorial experiences of space, colour and perception.
He has exhibited internationally, with shows at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, CA, IVAM, Valencia, Spain and Espace Electra, Paris France.
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg donated an edition of 'Sky Space' (2006) for the 2019 Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Portrait of James Turrell, © James Turrell, Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
James White (b.1967) is a British artist, known for his almost photographic, hyper-detailed paintings. Originating from snapshots taken by the artist, his work explores his environment, both in domestic settings and more foreign ones, acting as a kind of cutaway film shot; White aims to create a psychological space to reflect on moments of everyday life in their wider narrative arc.
He has held several solo exhibitions internationally, and in 2006, won the John Moores 24 Painting Prize.
In 2019, Art of Wishes acquired 'Another Hotel #1' (2011), courtesy of the artist and Blain Southern, which was later auctioned at the biannual Charity Lunch in 2022.
Portrait of James White, Photo by Peter Mallet
Jan Frank (b. 1951) is an American painter and curator, known for his pioneering installations of video sculpture in the late 1970s. More recently, he has become famed for his lyrical and abstract drawings and large-scale paintings.
In 1975, he won a place in the prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. Since then, he has been exhibiting in New York and internationally, as well as having work represented in major private collections and museums.
In 2017, Art of Wishes acquired 'Top Ends Up' (2013) for auction, courtesy of the artists and Nahmad Contemporary.
Jennifer Bartlett (1941 – 2022) was an American painter and printmaker, famed for her works assembled from small, square, enamel-coated plates that combined to form a large grid.
Most of her work would take well-known subjects – a house, the ocean, the sky – and render them in a more abstract style – she was noted for her refusal to distinguish between figurative and abstract art.
She has worked in various public collections, among which include the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, New York, NY. She also had several retrospectives and survey exhibitions, including one in 2011 at MoMA, New York, NY.
In 2019, the Jennifer Bartlett trust donated an edition of Conversation I (2005) to Art of Wishes for auction.
For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium, whether a T-shirt, plaque, or electronic sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to her work. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. Holzer received the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017. She holds honorary degrees from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and Smith College. She lives and works in New York.
Jenny Saville (b.1970) is a world-renowned painter and member of the Young British Artists, who trained at the Glasgow School of Art.
Her work often explores the human form, drawing from, but often distorting classical figurations. Beneath Saville’s work is an extreme interest in the fleshly and the grotesque, drawing inspiration from pathology textbooks and models who have undergone cosmetic surgery, aiming to capture ‘marks of personality for the flesh.’
One of the most prominent YBAs, her art was featured in several notable group shows, including Young British Artists III, Saatchi Gallery, London (1994), Contemporary British Art ’96, Museum of Kalmar, Stockholm (1996) and the iconic Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997). She is represented by Gagosian, who have organised several solo exhibitions of her work. Additionally, she was appointed as a lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Arts, London, United Kingdom between 2000-2006.
Inspired by the 'Pietà', Saville, along with Gagosian, donated her work 'Exodus' (2020-2021) to the 2021 Art of Wishes Gala auction.
That same year, our founder and patron Batia Ofer flew to Florence to interview Saville about her practice and this work.
Joana Vasconcelos (b.1971) is a Portuguese artist, most known for her large-scale installations.
She has been part of several major exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale twice and a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. She was the first woman and the youngest contemporary artist to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles, at its annual exhibition. In 2009, she was the recipient of the Order of Prince Henry.
In 2019, Fundação Joana Vasconcelos and Albion Barn donated 'Spinoza' (2019) to Art of Wishes for auction in 2019.
Joel Mesler (b.1974) is an American artist, known for his playful paintings which feature wry and witty text against a bold, vibrant background. His work is often nostalgic, drawing on Mesler’s own personal recollections and preoccupations from his childhood.
He has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions worldwide and is also a gallery owner.
In 2019, Mesler, alongside Rental Gallery, donated 'Untitled (Collector)' (2019) to Art of Wishes.
Joel Shapiro (b.1941) is a world-renowned American sculptor. Described as a minimalist, most of his works are composed of simple rectangular shapes and constructed primarily from wood and bronze.
He has completed more than thirty commissions in major cities worldwide and has been the subject of more than 160 solo exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. The French Minister of Culture awarded Shapiro the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005 and in 2013 he was honoured with the National Art Award for Outstanding Achievement by Americans for the Arts. What’s more, in 2015 he was awarded The International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Shapiro and Lévy Gorvy donated 'Untitled' (2015) to the 2019 Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Portrait of Joel Shapiro, Credit to Pace Gallery
With a career spanning more than fifty years, John Armleder’s oeuvre is equally expansive. At various points he has been dubbed part of Fluxus, Suprematism, and Minimalism movements, and his diverse output—which transcends media and genre— continues to defy categorisation. Drawing from an array of historical moments, from Dada to Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual art, Armleder’s practice opens new aesthetic and visual horizons.
Born in Geneva where he still lives, Armleder studied at the city’s École des Beaux-Arts. In 1969, he cofounded the Ecart Group. Armleder’s work is held in museums worldwide including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. His exhibition history is similarly international, and over the past ten years, Armleder has had solo exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. This year saw his solo presentation Monotypes at Kunsthalle Zürich.
John Giorno (1936-2019) was an American performance artist and poet. Holding close friendships with William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, he organised a number of early pioneering poetry experiments and events.
His series Poem Paintings contain short excerpts from his writings and often set phrases that have continually haunted him. He was represented by Almine Rech.
He, along with Frahm & Frahm, donated 'Words Come From Sound' (2017) to Art of Wishes for auction in 2017.
Portrait of John at 222 Bowry c. 1969 - Photo by Gianfranco Mantegna
Joshua Raz (b.1993) is a British painter. Interested in the contemporary milieu, his work aims to reflect and interrogate artificialities. Exploring the individual versus community, authority and anthropological observations, he aims to present spliced landscapes and warped perspectives.
He has participated in several group exhibitions nationally and has been the subject of two solo exhibitions. In 2016 he won The Hix Award.
In 2017, Art of Wishes and Philips commissioned Raz to create a painting based on a child’s wish. He created 'Green Lights Above a Blue Planet and Man Amongst It All' (2017), inspired by Oakley, a nine-year-old boy living with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, whose wish was to go and see the Northern Lights. This work was auctioned at the inaugural Art of Wishes Gala in 2017, courtesy of the artis and Phillips.
Julian Opie, (b. 1958) is a British visual artist. Part of the New British Sculpture movement, Opie’s work has often been compared to pop art.
His commissioned work includes the album cover of Blur: the best of (2000) and a portrait of Kames Dyson (titles James, Inventor) by the National Portrait Gallery. He has had several international solo exhibitions, and his work is found in many public art collections, including Tate, British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and MoMA.
In 2021, Art of Wishes acquired 'Magpie' (2021) for auction.
KAWS (b. 1974) is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings and prints.
There is a clear vein of Pop Culture in KAWS' art, most noticeably in his cast of cartoonish characters and motifs, including his best-known characters with crossed-out eyes.
Between 2020-2021, KAWS was the most-sold contemporary artist of the year. He is represented by Skarstedt Gallery, New York, and has had several notable solo shows, including at the Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, The National Gallery of Melbourne, Australia and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain.
Alongside Skarstedt Gallery, he donated the editioned,
WHAT PARTY (BLUE)
WHAT PARTY (GREY)
WHAT PARTY (PINK)
WHAT PARTY (ORANGE)
WHAT PARTY (LIGHT PINK)
WHAT PARTY (RED)
WHAT PARTY (YELLOW) (2020) to the Art of Wishes Gala 2021 auction.
Kevin Francis Gray is known for works in marble which flex the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. Offering a convincing argument for the continued significance of traditional media in the contemporary world, Gray presents figures and forms in transition and in various states of becoming. In each of Gray’s works an acute vitality is captured in that residue of the artist’s hand is left permanent in stone; sheets of white Carrara marble framed in burnt umber Sapele wood incorporate the lines of human shapes through the negative space carved into the stone.
Part of a growing body of work that the artist started in 2018, the marble panels originate from Gray’s life-drawing sketches in ink, watercolours and pastel. The artist isolates lines and angles from the drawings and transitions them to the page of marble, which seems to have been sculpted only with fingers. The human form is abstracted beyond recognition. The result is a wall sculpture that appears delicate but draws the viewer into its texture: the marble is unmistakable and the skill of releasing a work so subtle from the stone is a testament to Gray’s commitment to his material.
Kevin Gray was born in 1972 in Armagh. Work by Gray has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as the Royal Academy, London; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Val de-Marne, Paris; Museo d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv. Recent solo exhibitions have been held across the UK, Italy, France, Denmark, the US and Israel, and Gray’s work is held in collections in both the UK and US. Educated at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, and Goldsmiths, London, Francis Gray lives and works in London, UK, and Pietrasanta, Italy.
Kon Trubkovich (b. 1979) is a Russian multi-media artist. He works with the idea of ‘truthful’ documentation, referencing and reconstructing political and social events from their portrayal in the media. Focusing mainly on temporalities, his work draws on many sources, including his family’s emigration from the USSR to the United States.
Represented by Gagosian, he has had work shown internationally at venues such as MoMA, New York, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland. Included in USA: American Video Art at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium, he was shown at the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2007.
Alongside Gagosian, he donated 'Smur' (2021) to the Art of Wishes 2021 auction.
Maarten Baas is a renowned artist and designer, whose work emerges from the intersection of these fields. Known for his craftsmanship and public works as much as for conceptual art, installation and performance, Baas embodies an unruly intellectualism and theatrical flair. Enthralled by the concept of time, Baas’ engagement with the fourth dimension permeates much of his work across media as divergent as video and performance, sculpture and set design. Above all, what emerges is a respect for the abstractions and multiplicities of time, and the way it takes shape within the mind of the individual.
Baas was born in 1978 in the Netherlands. Amongst many public and private collections, Baas’ work is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. In 2016, Baas was awarded the Artprize for his Real Time Sweepers Clock. In 2012, two of the artist’s series, ‘Smoke’ and ‘Clay’, were listed in the New York Times ‘Top 25 Design Classics of the Future’, and in 2009 Baas was named Designer of the Year at Design Basel/Miami. Baas lives and works in the Netherlands.
Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985) is a British-Malaysian artist, who works across diverse media to examine how social, cultural and political orders are formed and deconstructed in the contemporary world.
Represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, she was shortlisted for the biannual Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2017. Her work has also been shown in exhibitions at Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon, The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico, MoMA PS1, New York and Instituo de Visión, Bogotá, Colombia.
In 2021 Thaddaeus Ropac donated the work Net-Grid Study (Bread and Life) (2021) for the Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Marcel Dzama’s lyrical, radiant visual language is presented through dream sequences or surreal, often subversive, fairytales. In scenes where both the whimsical and carnivalesque intermingle, Dzama folds contemporary social and political issues into an art historical narrative steeped in folk vernacular. Dzama works in media spanning painting, drawing, ceramic, video and costume design, as well as a recent work in mosaic produced for a public commission at the Bedford Avenue Station in Brooklyn, New York.
Dzama was born in 1974 in Manitoba, Canada. His work is found in numerous permanent collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, and the Tate, London. Recent major solo exhibitions of Dzama’s work include those at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico; the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, USA, and the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Finland. A major survey of Dzama’s career was held in 2010 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada. Dzama lives and works in New York City.
Over the course of six decades, Martha Jungwirth has evolved a singular form of abstraction centered on the notion of individual experience. Triggered by personal encounters, travel, art history, mythology and contemporary events, Jungwirth allows fleeting impulses to reveal themselves through paint. Adopting a tight chromatic scheme of pinks and reds, Jungwirth’s works are above all an extension of the artist’s own bodily experience and a testament to the significance of inhabiting the human form.
Jungwirth was born in 1940 in Vienna. The recipient of numerous accolades while still a student at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Jungwirth later taught at that institution for a decade. She was a co-founder and the sole female member of the Viennese collective Wirklichkeiten (Realities), whose work was exhibited at the Secession, Vienna in 1968. Retrospectives of Jungwirth’s remarkable career have been held at the Museum LIaunig, Neuhaus in 2020 and the Kunsthalle Krems in 2014.
In recent years, extensive solo exhibitions of Jungwirth’s career have been staged at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Albertina, Vienna. In 2018, Jungwirth received the prestigious Oskar Kokoschka Prize from the Austrian State. A forthcoming retrospective will take place at the Guggenheim, Bilbao in 2024.
Mat Collishaw (b.1966) is an English photographer and videographer. Part of the YBAs, Collishaw’s work aims to subvert imaging of the contemporary world – glossy advertisements and garish, exploitative news footage – to construct visual narratives about the dark side of image making.
Exhibiting at the iconic group show Freeze organised by Damien Hirst in 1998, he has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world.
He, alongside Blain Southern, donated an edition of 'Tulip Mania' (2017) to Art of Wishes to auction in 2017.
Michael Armitage’s pictorial narratives look to the visual iconography of East Africa. To create his panoramic visions, Armitage draws from historical and current events,
the media, and his own memories. He paints atop Lubugo, a Ugandan cloth made from bark that has been beaten and flattened over a period of days. Ultimately, Armitage understands art to be a vehicle for social change and he encourages viewers of his work to gaze directly at the worlds he reveals.
Armitage was born in Nairobi and now splits his time between Nairobi and London.
He received his BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, and the Royal Academy in London. In 2020, Armitage opened the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute to showcase art by East African artists. In 2021, he was elected a Royal Academician of Painting.
Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941) is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He also is a famous tutor, being the Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. He had a significant influence on the YBA artists, particularly Damien Hurst.
His work most often entails line drawings of ordinary objects, usually accompanied by a vivid background. Represented by Gagosian, he has been the subject of numerous worldwide exhibitions and retrospectives of his work have taken place at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland. His work is in several notable public collections.
In 2019, Gagosian donated 'Untitled (Baby Bottle)' (2014) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Michael Landy (b.1963) is a British artist, widely known as one of the Young British Artists. Working across a variety of media, amongst his most famed works is the performance piece installation Break Down (2001).
In 2008, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in 2021 was appointed CBE for his services to art. His work has been exhibited internationally.
In 2017, he created the piece 'Pylon Man' (2017) inspired by Felix, a seven-year-old suffering from a rare blood disorder, who dreamed of being an electroman. The work was donated for auction at the 2017 Art of Wishes Gala, courtesy of Michael Landy and Thomas Dane Gallery.
Portrait of Michael Landy, Photo © David Bebber
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu uses the act of painting to (re)think, (re)work and (re)imagine the world and our place within it. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become a prominent language for Masamvu to explore structures of power and how history comes to bear on the contemporary moment, but also how one can adapt to a new way of interacting with the world. Where earlier paintings have grappled with creating the tools that could help to confront the histories of one’s past, providing a mode of existing within the present moment, Daybreak makes use of the transition and interplay between the past, the present and the future initiating a new way of being. For the artist, this renewed reality and perspective embraces history, acknowledging that everything that has been recorded can be understood as memory, recognising that every effect of memory influences how one interprets the world around them. As Masamvu says of his practice: “With my work, the canvas offers me a moment to live and try things out. To feel my pulse. To ask. To be scared, and deal with that fear. To be courageous and to find myself. To discover a way to heal... because a painting takes everything, and above all, it gives me the agency to be my own protagonist”.
The early years of Nicholas Hlobo’s career coincided with the end of apartheid in the artist’s native South Africa. The optimism and liberatory sentiment of this period is reflected in much of Hlobo’s body of work, where metaphorically resonant materials such as ribbon, leather, thread, and rubber are melded and brought together in complex visual narratives which present evocative meditations on race, gender, and identity.
Hlobo was born in 1975 in Cape Town. He has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town, and Tate Modern, London, and his work is held in collection at numerous institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London, and the South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
Work by Hlobo will be included in the upcoming large-scale exhibition The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican, London. Hlobo was selected as a protégé by mentor Anish Kapoor as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. He lives and works in Johannesburg.
Nokukhanya Langa’s instantly recognisable canvases represent a bringing together of abstraction with disparate disgrammatic elements. The artist’s practice extends beyond paint into the fabric of the canvas itself, shaped by the artist into organic and playful forms, which lend her work a sculptural, tactile quality. Langa’s canvases embody an accumulation of lived experience, depicting phrases and image fragments culled from contemporary internet culture and Langa’s own childhood, as well as those allegories and fairytales which shaped it.
Langa was born in 1991 in Maryland. Langa’s work is held in collection by the Centre Pompidou as part of the DUST: The Plates of the Present commission. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in the US, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, where she is represented by Saatchi Yates. Langa is recipient of numerous accolades including the C.o.C.A Award, 2022. Having lived and studied across the US, India, the Netherlands and Belgium, Langa lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.
Oliver Beer (b.1985) is a British artist and musician. Interested in the relationship between sound, space, voice and architecture, Beer creates sculptural, installation and film projects.
Oliver Beer's work has been the subject of many screenings as well as solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom; the Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Vuitton and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Hebbel Theater, Berlin, Germany. Beer has also held residencies at the Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Foundation and the Fondation Hermès.
In 2017, Art of Wishes commissioned Beer to create a work inspired by eighteen-year-old wish child Tamir. Suffering from a brain tumour, Tamir’s wish was to own a viola and play with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. Beer created and donated, alongside Thaddaeus Ropac, 'Beautiful Continuity' (2017) to Art of Wishes.
Portrait of Oliver Beer, Photo by Chahyek Yung, © Oliver Beer, Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul
Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe (b.1988) is a Ghanaian artist, now based in the US, and part of the generation of West African artists rising within the art world. He paints mainly portraits, depicting African men and women against vibrant backdrops.
Represented by Almine Rech, he has exhibited internationally, including at Portland Art Museum, Portland OR, Front Space, Paris, France and Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium.
Art of Wishes received an Artist Proof of Rancher (2021) for auction in 2021, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Pascal Sender (b.1988) is a Swiss artist who works with code and Augmented Reality. Recently he has created an app where his paintings, when viewed through a phone camera, are rendered into three-dimensional forms and figures move and interact with the viewer.
He is represented by Saatchi Yates and is currently studying at the Royal Academy School.
In 2021, Saatchi Yates donated 'Dog1' (2020) to Art of Wishes for auction.
Peter Doig (b. 1959) is a Scottish artist, known as one of the most renowned living figurative painters.
Doig has held major solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris , Dallas Museum of Art, and Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 2014, a retrospective opened at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, which travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark. His work is also represented in many international museum collections, including MoMA, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany, Tate Modern, London, United Kindom and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel.
In 1993, Doig won the John Moores Painting Prize, and the following year, he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2017, he was named the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon.
In 2021, he gifted the work Paraground Cricket (2010) to the Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Portrait of Peter Doig, photo by Fergus Carmichael, courtesy of The Courtauld,
Polly Morgan (b.1980) is a British artist known for her use of taxidermy. Employing the language of the macabre, Morgan arranges animals in fantastical compositions to create her taxidermy sculptures.
She has exhibited extensively and Her works are held in multiple public and private collections internationally, including the Zabludowicz Collection, David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC and The New Art Gallery Walsall.
In 2017, Morgan created 'Oakley’s Wish' (2017) inspired by nine-year-old Oakley, who wished to see the Northern Lights. She, along with Sotheby’s, donated the work to Art of Wishes for auction.
Rashid Johnson (b.1977) is a contemporary American multi-media artist. Working within sculpture, painting, filmmaking and installation, he often references African American intellectual history and cultural identity within his work.
Represented at Hauser & Wirth, he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including
Aspen Award for Art, Tony Goldman Visionary Artist Award, and the David C. Driskell Prize. He has also had several solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
In 2021, Art of Wishes received an Artist Proof of 'Untitled Anxious Red', (2021) for that year’s silent auction from the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Richard Wright (b.1960) is an English artist and musician. He is best known for site-specific works, that often only last as long as the exhibition.
Represented by Gagosian, his work has been exhibited in major shows worldwide, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Queen’s House, London, United Kingdom. He was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2009.
Art of Wishes acquired a Poster Edition of 'Untitled (Figures 1-6)' (2002) for auction in 2019, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Rob Pruitt (b.1964) is an American post-conceptual artist, who works primarily in painting, installation and sculpture. His work is varied and unique, although it is always personal and biographical. His practice often embraces a playful aesthetic that combines formal rigour with references to popular culture.
He has exhibited numerous times internationally and in 2013, the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO held a retrospective of his work.
In 2017, he assembled the collage, 'Exquisite Self-portrait: Star Wars I' (2017) inspired by Oliver’s wish to train as a Jedi and fight Darth maul from Star Wars. Six-year-old Oliver was living which an undiagnosed genetic condition, which caused problems with his heart, kidney, bowels and bladder. Pruitt, along with Massimo de Carlo, donated the work for auction to Art of Wishes.
Portrait of Rob Pruitt, Photo by Roe Ethridge
Rose Wylie (b. 1934) is a world-famous painter, who selects one particular subject for each new body of work, as she is propelled by visual excitement.
One of the winners of the 2011 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize for Visual Arts, she later won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2014. The next year, she became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, where she received the Charles Wollaston Award for ‘most distinguished work’ in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In 2012, a retrospective of her work was held at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, United Kingdom. She is represented by David Zwirner.
Art of Wishes received Edition 3 of 6 of 'Pineapple' (2021) from the artist and David Zwirner.
Working with the trope of the Harlequin as Trickster Whore, Berman examines the societal constructs of the female experience. She radicalises the historically female domain of portraiture. In painting herself, Berman refutes the male gaze and objectification of women. The figures are often defiant and Berman’s gentle muted aesthetic is fraught with contrapuntal layers, the canvas appears almost bruised; the visceral and corporeal juxtaposed with a delicacy and fluidity of line and movement. Berman’s work uses its very appeal to defy expectation: a violent transgression within beauty.
Sara Berman was born in 1975 and lives and works in London. She is represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and has had solo exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions, including her recent exhibition at the Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam.
She studied for her MFA at Slade School of Fine Art UCL, graduating in 2016.
Sivan Sternbach’s playful balloon sculptures are reminiscent of childhood memories and intended as talismans of such times past. Command of the medium of clay comes naturally to the artist, the result of her earlier career as a pastry chef. In both pastry and clay, particularly in Sternbach’s hands, there is a striking relationship between medium and effect, a lightness evoked through the careful working, and in many ways defiance, of dense media. Sternbach’s corpus of balloon sculptures offer a viewing experience both disorientating and delightfully provocative.
Propelled by striking social media success, Sternbach’s balloons have become a widespread sensation. Adorning spaces as distinct as the windows of flagship department store Bergdorf Goodman, New York, as well as the galleries of the Israel Museum in the artist’s native Israel, Sternbach’s balloons are an undisputed emblem of our contemporary time. Sternbach lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Stanley Whitney stands among today’s most important abstract painters. Drawing upon influences ranging from European art history to experimental jazz, he is deeply attuned to the complexities of colour. Raised in a small African American community in Pennsylvania, he moved to New York during the 1960s, where the city and its art scene fuelled his imagination. It was not until a trip to Rome and Egypt during the 1990s, however, that his art began to assume its current form, defined by architectural blocks of colour and thin horizontal bands. Whitney paints with gestural, intuitive brushwork, allowing light and movement to seep through his structures.
Stefan Brüggemann (b.1975) is a Mexican artist. Incorporating sculpture, video, painting and drawing, Brüggemann is famed for his conceptual installations, which are characterised by an acerbic social critique and a post-pop aesthetic.
He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.
In 2017, he created 'Time x Time' (2017), inspired by three-year-old Oliver’s wish to become an astronaut. He, along with Stefan Brüggemann donated the work to Art of Wishes for their inaugural gala in 2017.
Suzy Murphy (b. 1964) is a British artist. Moving briefly to Canada in her youth, she is well known for her landscape paintings, which capture her love of the outdoors. Preferring to classify her work as a kind of self-portraiture, her paintings often act as diaries, as the narrative of her life subconsciously runs throughout her work, presenting itself in all her paintings.
Her work is held in many public and private collections worldwide, and she has won numerous awards, including Henry Yates Thompson Art Prize in 1982, Elizabeth Greenshields Prize in 1987 and National Open Art Landscape Prize in 2016.
Murphy donated 'Under a Big Yellow Sky' (2019) to Art of Wishes for auction in 2019.
The Haas Brothers – twins Nikolai and Simon (b.1984) – are known for their playful designs and approach to furniture, and have collaborated with many big names including, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Versace. The Haas Brothers’ works are included in major collections including the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. They are represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Art of Wishes received Skunky Gold Medina for their 2021 Silent Auction, courtesy of the artist and Marianna Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Portrait of the Haas Brothers, Photo by Ian Flanigan
Thomas Demand (b.1964) is a German sculptor and photographer, whose work investigates the persistence of images, ideas of collective memory and destruction.
He has exhibited several times internationally, including solo shows at MoMA, New York, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
In 2017, Art of Wishes commissioned Demand to create an artwork inspired by a child’s wish. Choosing Tamir, an eighteen-year-old who wished to have a viola and perform with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Demand created, and alongside Sprüth Mafers, donated 'Untitled', (2017) to Art of Wishes for auction.
The graphic motif of a flattened matchbox recurs throughout Wachholz’ artistic corpus. For many years Wachholz has collected these objects, culled from hotel lobbies, petrol stations, restaurants and bars as physical mementos or talismans of other places, and times past. Wachholz’s oeuvre is thus steeped in the personal, yet in his response to the physical and contemporary world and resulting emphasis on the formal, Wachholz constructs a truly universal visual language. Drawing on the rich legacy of Pop, Wachholz elevates the everyday.
Wachholz was born in 1984 and studied at the Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf under Katharina Grosse and Marcel Odenbach. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries across Germany, Switzerland, France, South Africa and the US. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Atelierstipendium studio grant by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Wachholz lives and works in Cologne.
Tracey Emin (b.1963) is a world-renowned British artist, famed for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. She works across several media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography and installation works.
A member of the YBAs, she is now a Royal Academician. Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Leopold Museum, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002).
In 2017, Art of Wishes teamed up artists with wish children to create unique artworks. 6-year-old Grace dreamed to go on holiday in Wales with her pony. Emin created three paintings picturing Grace riding through the countryside. The triptych of works was acquired by Art ofWishes in 2017, courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) is a Swiss artist, who came to prominence in the 1990s. Widely known for his use of different media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and video installation, he is most famed for his large-scale, colourful sculpture Seven Magic Mountains, (2016-2021).
He has had major exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Bass and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as representing Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2007. His large-scale public artworks have appeared in a number of cities including Liverpool and Miami.
In 2021, Art of Wishes obtained the sculpture Yellow Red Mountain (2021) for auction, courtesy of the artist and Frahm & Frahm.
Victoria Morton (b.1971) is a Scottish painter. As she is also a musician, her work is greatly informed by music – the synthesis of colour and form in her compositions are informed by her perception of rhythm, dissonance and time.
Represented by Sadie Coles HQ, she has exhibited several times nationally and internationally and has received several awards and grants for her work.
In 2017, Art of Wishes invited several artists to create artworks inspired by children’s wishes. Influenced by her own background in music, Morton painted 'The Wolf Note' (2017) from Tamir’s wish to own a viola and play with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and donated the piece to the Art of Wishes Gala auction.
Portrait of Victoria Morton, Photo by Audrey Bizouerne © Victoria Morton, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
