Curated by The Auction Collective and five art world insiders, The Top 100 celebrates the very best contemporary artists creating artwork under £5,000.
Exhibited at The Department Store in Brixton, and split into two auctions, the show brings together a hand picked selection of over 100 artworks.
The Selection Panel
Benjamin Murphy - artist and co-founder of Delphian Gallery.
Kate Bryan - art historian, curator, broadcaster and Head of Collections Soho House.
Tabish Khan - art critic, writer and editor for the Londonist.
Katy Wickremesinghe - founder of the Wick and KTW London.
Georgie Wimbush - Director at White Cube Gallery.
Francesca Wilson - Curator at The Auction Collective.
Learn more about the curator's selections through their interviews here.
Dwayne Coleman is a multidisciplinary artist known for an inventive and resourceful practice that encompasses, works on paper, sculptures, installations, videos and most commonly painting.
Tying the Japanese concept of Boro patchwork with his own experiences, Dwayne resourcefully, dyes, sews and recycles his own materials into brick-patterned paintings.
Every painting is a struggle as I try to figure something out through paint that it is difficult to express in words.
- Kim Booker
I use painting to test the pressures felt by figures in space - and to attempt to provide them with some relief: a soft cushion, an open window, a staircase, a stranger's hand... Each of my paintings contains a moment of intimacy. I’m drawn to the ways in which our relationships with others and the environments we inhabit can blur the boundaries that delineate the self.
- Mary Macken Allen
Una Ursprung utilizes a variety of mediums and techniques to explore the space and visual experiences of painting. She employs abstract lines to create a vivid contrast through the combination of oil painting and spray painting.
The liberating and quick nature of spray paint immediately alter the careful and slow strokes of the original landscape constructed within the atmosphere of the forest.
This painting, depicting a weave which is so detailed that it illusionistically echoes the woven texture of the fabric it is painted on, is loosely based on a painting by Mondrian and inspired by Greek/Roman mythology.
- Christina Niederberger
"Grayson Perry is from larger series called ‘Portraits with Fans’ where I made images of famous male artists being excited to meet me. Others in the series include Damien Hirst, The Chapman Brothers and Jeff Koons."
- Sarah Maple
Joy Yamusangie is a visual artist, currently working in London. Specialising in illustration, Joy experiments with a range of traditional processes such as drawing, film, painting and collaging to produce mixed media pieces.
Their previous projects have included a public art installation commissioned by Tate Collectives, the cover for the 2021 Penguin edition of C. L. R. James' Minty Alley and co-directing the film WATA.
Using marquetry techniques, a painstaking process of laying wood veneers down into a design, Olly fathers creates geometric, shape-based work which celebrate the beauty in grain and colour of the various wood veneers used.
"I grew up with an imagination being fed by Transformers cartoons, pixelated video games, heavy metal album sleeves and science fiction book covers. As an adult I found Krasner, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Kelly and Newman in the art school library, and fell in love with their big, badass abstract paintings.
I think about the paintings I make now as a mash up of all these things, remixed on a canvas as something new but also strangely familiar."
- Charley Peters
The skies, footpaths, trees and seas I see again and again day after day. These are the motifs I repeat, rework, destroy and process.
- Kerry Harding
Miranda Forrester’s practice explores the queer black female gaze in painting, relating to the history of men painting womxn naked.
The work is concerned with addressing the invisibility of black womxn in the western history of art and representing these lives and experiences from an authentic perspective.
My favourite artist is Emily Moore. Last year she was included in a special online show that White Cube created called Tomorrow London - graduates from across the key fine art courses in the country were selected by a curatorial team to take part. Emily was in one of the presentations and she really stood out to me; the works feel alive and rebellious - I have no doubt we will see much more of her in the future.
- Georgie Wimbush, Director, White Cube
For Clare Dudeney, weaving is a meditative process, like taking a walk with threads. Within the bounds of a grid structure and repetitive process, she finds a freedom, mixing many fine yarns to create soft transitions and vibrant contrasts - like splashes of paint.
The fragmented forms reveal memories, tender observations of rippling water, bark, stones and the body. These woven paintings are fragile, made of many tiny moments.
In Taru Happonen's paintings, organic forms from the untouched nature merge with human-built shapes creating an inseparable whole.
Taru has been playing with a thought about a creature that is visiting and seeing the Earth for the first time.
These works are as much a record of my own experience of that place, on that day, as they are of the strangers portrayed within the painting.
- Christabel Blackburn
Amy Beager was selected as a winner for the Delphain Gallery open call 2020 and started exhibiting her work in London in 2019.
Her painting ‘The Blue Room’ is currently on display at Saatchi Gallery as part of the group exhibition ‘Antisocial Isolation’ curated by Delphian Gallery.
