Art of Wishes Gala 2023 raised £2.6m for Make-A-Wish UK, enough to fund over 1000 wishes.
The Gala was one of the first events to be hosted at the spectacular new Raffles Hotel London at The OWO. This historical landmark was the perfect setting for such an incredible evening where some of today’s most recognised artists, gallerists and celebrity talent gathered.
2022
In the Autumn of 2022, Art of Wishes staged an auction of fifty-one of Italian jeweller Fabio Salini’s creations, raising over £750,000 for Make-A-Wish UK.
The collaboration between Salini, Art of Wishes and Sotheby’s came about as a consequence of the turmoil caused by the Covid pandemic, during which Salini found himself repeatedly questioning the role of art in times of crisis. He said: ‘My jewellery is an aesthetic expression of concepts and feelings and the events of the past three years made me think about how I could use these works to help others. I was searching for a greater purpose for my work and as such am delighted to make this donation in aid of Art of Wishes — it is a magnificent charity that seeks to deliver dreams and experiences to children who are going through very difficult times. What is the purpose of art if it cannot change lives?’
Of the collaboration, Batia said, ‘I have always been a huge admirer of Fabio’s exquisite jewellery, and when he proposed this idea I was genuinely overwhelmed by his generosity. In making this donation, Fabio not only helped make the wishes of thousands of children come true, but also made a meaningful impact on their lives. I will forever thank him and offer my sincerest gratitude for his truly transformative gesture.’
2021
In 2021 Make-A-Wish UK granted its 15,00th wish. To commemorate this achievement, Art of Wishes commissioned artist Brendan Dawes to create an NFT artwork inspired by children and their wishes, to be auctioned at the 2021 gala.
Dawes uses generative systems, relying on data, machine learning and code to craft his pieces. This work, entitled 15,000 Wishes, features 15,000 multi-coloured strands, each one to represent a wish that has turned into reality thanks to the work of the Make-A-Wish UK Foundation. Hope, possibility, beauty derived from chaos, the restoration of childhood and a change from the norm are the themes that run through every strand.
June 2020
Amidst the nationwide lockdown of 2020, British artists Annie Morris and Idris Khan, OBE, each created and donated one hundred limited edition prints of two artworks to Art of Wishes.
Typical of the artist’s style, Khan’s Long Live Love (2020) is composed from a variety of media, including watercolour, oil sticks and sheet music, which he layers continuously to build an abstract, rhythmic piece.
Morris’ Two Hills (2020) takes inspiration from the daily diaries she filled during the pandemic. The re-occurring rhythms and symbols of her family’s life and anxieties are translated into this poetic, narrative drawing.
Khan said of the two prints, ‘“I think both images allude to a childlike drawing sensibility - free and creative movements and gestures… almost like beautiful wishes in themselves!”
June 2017
In 2017, Art of Wishes presented a number of artists with children’s wishes, asking them to create a visualisation of their desires.
Artworks included Tracey Emin’s tryptic I Was Wishing For You, Riding on the Waves, and I Wish for You, her recreation of nine-year-old Grace’s wish to ride her pony across the Welsh countryside. Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Dan Colen and Thomas Demand were among the other artists commissioned, who represented wishes such as Tamir’s wish to play viola with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and Amy’s wish to go to the Royal Ballet School in London.
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.
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.
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.
