Artists and Authors

Suad Al-Attar (b. 1940, Baghdad) is a contemporary Iraqi painter whose work is rooted in the visual traditions of the Middle East. She received her undergraduate education at Baghdad University and studied at Wimbledon School of Art and London Central School of Art and Design during the mid-1970s. Her works are held in the British Museum, London, and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, though many of them once held in the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad have been lost.

David Bailey was born in Leytonstone, London. After working as fashion photographer John French’s assistant, he published his first portrait of Somerset Maugham for Today magazine in 1960. He went on to photograph extensively for Vogue and has worked with some of the greatest names in fashion and music. Bailey has exhibited worldwide, with the first of his landmark exhibitions in 1971 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Internationally renowned, Bailey has produced some of the most famous photographic portraits of the last five decades.

Zarina Bhimji is an artist specialising in the mediums of photography and video installation. Her work is kept in collections around the world, including Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2007 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. She lives and works in London.

Keith Cunningham (1929–2014) was born in Sydney, Australia. He worked as a graphic designer before moving to London in 1949 where he studied at the Central School of Design (1949–51, now Central Saint Martins) and the Royal College of Art (1952–55). Cunningham continued to paint, but kept his work private, until the end of his life. At the time of his death, his paintings were discovered at his flat in Battersea, and debuted in an exhibition at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London, 2022.

Martin Eder was born in Augsburg in 1968. He trained as a commercial designer at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. He later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and Kassel before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden in 2001. Martin Eder’s work is represented in major collections worldwide. He lives and works in Berlin.

Liz Finch (b. 1951) is a British artist born in Blackburn in the north of England. She studied at Burnley School of Art in 1968 and the North Devon College of Art in Bideford in 1970. She works with a range of media incorporating drawing, painting, poetry and performance. Exhibitions include her pop-up show Crochet Nude (2005) at Tate Modern, London and A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense (2015) at Pace Gallery, London.

Gilbert Prousch was born in San Martin de Tor, Italy and George Passmore was born in Plymouth, England. They met in 1967 at Saint Martin’s School of Art when they formed their collective, Gilbert & George. They won the Turner Prize in 1986 and are known around the world for their relentlessly controversial art. Gilbert & George represented the UK in the British Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. The duo has been awarded doctorates from a number of UK universities and were elected Royal Academicians by the Royal Academy of the Arts, London in 2017. They have lived and worked on the same street in London’s East End since 1968.

Martin Harrison is the foremost authority on Francis Bacon. He has curated numerous exhibitions around the world and written widely on art and photography. Most notable among his many publications is the Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, edited in close collaboration with The Estate of Francis Bacon.

Luisa Heese is a writer and curator based in Germany. She has written widely on the work of contemporary artists and has worked on many curatorial projects.

Koo Jeong A was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her work spans various media including drawing, sculpture, installation, audio works and architecture. She has had a number of solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Her work is featured in the public collections of Tate Modern, London and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Lucy Liu is an award-winning actress and an artist from New York. She exhibited her first museum show at the National Museum of Singapore in 2018.

Shantell Martin is a British visual artist best known for her signature black and white small and large-scale drawings. She has had solo shows at The New Britain Museum of Art, 92Y Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York. Martin has collaborated with iconic brands such as Nike, Max Mara, Tiffany & Co. as well as with New York City Ballet and Kendrick Lamar for Miami Art Basel. Martin is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch ITP and a visiting scholar at MIT Media Lab. She lives and works in Jersey City and Los Angeles.

Blondey is a British artist, skateboarder, clothing designer and model living in London. He is creative director of fashion brand Thames and represented by the Kate Moss Agency. His work engages with popular culture as a means of communicating self, society and an interpretation and representation of modern day religion. He has collaborated with brands such as Arena Homme+, Adidas, Palace, and Burberry, among others. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world.

Sabine Moritz is an artist based in Cologne, Germany. Her paintings, works on paper and prints have been widely exhibited in museums throughout Europe, celebrating a distinct practice that combines highly personal approach to abstraction combined with figurative works inspired by documentary photographs, memory and an investigation of genre painting.

Eugénie Paultre (b. in Paris in 1979, lives in Paris and Normandy) studied then taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and since 2010 she has devoted herself to painting and writing. She is the author of numerous essays, novellas and poetry collections in English, German, and French published at Al Manar and Manuella Editions, Paris. Matter of Life is the second publication HENI Publishing, London, has dedicated to Paultre, following the release of Outline in 2018. Paultre has held solo exhibitions at the Institut français, Bratislava (2019), Gandy Gallery, Bratislava (2019) and Erna Hecey, Luxembourg (2020). She has recently taken part in group exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli (2017), Mudam, Luxembourg (2019) and Lévy Gorvy, Paris (2021).

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Germany. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and then the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His work has been the subject of exhibitions internationally, including touring retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Tate, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Richter has experimented with sculpture, photography, drawing and, notably, painting.

Will Scott is a photographer and filmmaker specialising in architectural subjects. Ongoing photographic projects include Seaside Shelters and The Architecture of the Underground. Scott’s photography has been featured in the Financial Times and on the BBC website. He is based in London and Edinburgh.

Nesma Shubber is a writer and art historian born in London. She gained a first class BA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art before spending two years in New York studying at The New School. She also holds a masters degree in Literature and Arts from the University of Oxford.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a world-renowned curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Alongside his curatorial practice, Obrist has written extensively on and around contemporary art, with a particular interest in the interview format.

Stephen Webster is an English jewellery designer based in London. He has won UK Jewellery Designer of the Year numerous times and in 2013 was awarded an MBE for services to the British jewellery industry. Working from his studio in Mayfair, Webster sells his work internationally to a number of high profile and celebrity clients. His unique style of design reflects a myriad of influences, from his punk background to his literary heroes.

Craig Wood was born in 1960 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He completed his Foundation Course at Dyfed College of Art (1985–86), in Carmarthen, Wales, and studied Fine Art at Goldsmith College of Art, London (1986–89). He currently lives and works in Wales.