What does it mean to collect art in London today? Perhaps the first problem with the question is the idea that there is a single London art world. Across the city, overlapping scenes operate at vastly different scales: artist-run spaces and young galleries sit alongside blue-chip dealers, auction houses, centuries-old collections, and some of the world’s most influential art schools.
From Mayfair to Deptford, Fitzrovia to Bethnal Green, art is embedded across London, and there are as many ways into its art world as there are ways to participate in it.
For collectors, this vastness creates an unusual proximity to artists and the communities around them. Someone might discover an artist at a graduate show or in a small gallery, follow their work across the city, and support their practice long before institutional or market recognition arrives. Artists, collectors, gallerists, students, curators, and dealers continually move between London’s different art worlds, creating relationships that connect its grassroots scenes to its established institutions and markets.
London, 2011
Gilbert & George
White Cube
This also makes collecting in London amorphous. It can mean buying emerging artists from small galleries, pursuing historic objects through Mayfair dealerships and auction rooms, or simply purchasing a first work to live with at home. While the art market at large still contains its barriers, the sheer breadth of London’s scene offers multiple points of entry, across tastes, generations, communities, and budgets.
Perhaps that plurality is what makes collecting in the Big Smoke so distinctive. There is no single route in, no single taste to follow, and no single definition of a collector. Artsy spoke to five collectors about how they navigate London’s overlapping art worlds, what drives them to buy, and the artists, galleries, and institutions that keep them excited about the city.
Selim Bouafsoun collects with an international eye
For Selim Bouafsoun, collecting is as much about relationships as it is about art. Though his relationship with art began from a young age, it was Alighiero Boetti’s 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern that proved formative, opening up new ways of thinking about time, collaboration, and systems.
Bouafsoun had always wanted to buy art, but initially found the prospect intimidating. Galleries, mentors, and friends eventually gave him the confidence to begin. “Collecting, I’ve come to realise, is never a solitary act,” he told Artsy.
His first acquisition was a painting by Bernhard Buhmann, bought from Dubai gallery Carbon12 in November 2015. Today, his collection spans more than 100 artists, with recent acquisitions including Álvaro Barrington, Monia Ben Hamouda, Sebastián Espejo, and Tomasz Kowalski. One work remains particularly close to him: Hommage à Bonnard (1972) by the late Tunisian painter Hédi Turki.
In London, Bouafsoun gravitates towards galleries willing to take risks, including Sadie Coles HQ, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, and LBF Contemporary. But he sees some of the city’s greatest energy beyond its established art infrastructure, among artists and spaces operating with limited resources and ambitious ideas. He is particularly excited by an emerging generation shaped by international lives and communities. Their internationalism, he said, “isn’t performed; it’s lived.”
Adelle Cohen believes collecting should be for everyone
As a new collector, Adelle Cohen’s path into art began, unusually, with being told not to make any. At school, her art teacher would send her into town to buy supplies for the class rather than letting her participate. Her entry into collecting came years later at British artist Shauna Cribbin’s solo show at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation, where an iridescent screenprint on metal caught her attention. “I instantly fell in love and had to buy it,” Cohen recalled. “That’s how I became a collector.”
Cohen’s London is centered on galleries in the city’s east, including Maureen Paley, Rose Easton, and Herald St, as well as Harlesden High Street in northwest London. She is drawn to programs that she sees as challenging without becoming exclusionary.
That accessibility is central to how Cohen thinks about collecting. Rather than an activity reserved for an established collector class, she believes buying art should be an ordinary way of participating in London’s art scene. “Everyone should be encouraged to buy art,” she said. “We all deserve to own it.”
Her taste isn’t entirely bound by seriousness either. The work she currently covets is by Dutch artist Diederik van Apple: an image of Nicolas Cage in the iconic film Leaving Las Vegas printed onto real dollar bills and submerged in glossy resin. “I shouldn’t love it,” Cohen admitted. “But I do.”
Fabian Kluth collects through curiosity
Fabian Kluth is reluctant to call himself a collector. “I see myself more as a project maker and entrepreneur,” he told Artsy. For him, art is an extension of a broader curiosity about people and what they choose to make.
Kluth’s interest in contemporary art intensified during the COVID-19 lockdowns. While galleries and museums were closed, he was struck by how active the art world remained online. Social media became his way into a community he had previously observed from the outside.
His first acquisition was a work on paper by German artist Rosa Loy. Since then, Kluth has gravitated towards artists with strong ideas who resist bending their practices to expectations. His collection includes Brett Charles Seiler, Pol Taburet, and Konrad Weichs. He is also drawn to women artists from older generations, including Nan Goldin and the late Swiss painter Irène Zurkinden.
In London, Kluth is less interested in the set calendar of fairs and gallery weekends than in accidental discovery. He prefers wandering through the city and entering galleries without a plan, and points to Düsseldorf- and Berlin-based SETAREH’s Mayfair space as a welcome recent addition.
For Kluth, London’s strength lies in its mix of generations and international perspectives. Its art schools are central to that, with Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art among the places he looks to for what might come next.
Ultimately, his approach starts with people. “Whenever I meet someone,” Kluth said, “one of the first questions I ask is, ‘What are you currently working on?’”
Daria Borisova backs artists early
For London-based curator and art advisor Daria Borisova, collecting, curating, and community are closely connected. Her work has long centered on emerging artists, and that instinct for discovery carries into her collection: encountering an artist early, for her, is less about predicting the market than supporting a practice as it develops.
One of Borisova’s earliest acquisitions was a painting by the late British artist Sarah Cunningham, whom she remembers for the sensitivity and personality of both her work and their interactions. Today, Borisova is drawn to artists developing distinctive ways of working.
She points to The Artsy Vanguard alum Emily Kraus, who pulls canvases around constructed rooms to spread and smear paint across their surfaces; KV Duong, whose paintings on latex explore Vietnamese diasporic queer experience; and Antonio Társis, who transforms discarded matchboxes, cardboard, and paint tins into art. “These artists aren’t just making beautiful things,” Borisova said. “They’re making arguments.”
Her collection also reflects an appetite for discovering artists early. George Rouy, Eva Helene Pade, Joseph Yaeger, Flora Yukhnovich, and Jadé Fadojutimi are among the artists she encountered before their wider recognition.
For Borisova, this process of discovery is central to London’s appeal. Hayward Gallery and the Barbican Centre are favorite institutional haunts, but she sees the city’s real strength in the community around them: collectors, artists, and galleries invested in one another. “The energy starts here,” she said. “We find them first.”
Linton Wang looks to the past for inspiration
While many young collectors look for the next emerging artist, Linton Wang is more likely to be found pursuing an object several centuries old. His collecting began as a teenager with fountain pens, particularly examples from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their precious-metal decoration led him towards silver and decorative arts. Studies in history of art, followed by a master’s at the Courtauld Institute, expanded his interests across European art and material culture, with a particular focus on the Age of Enlightenment.
For Wang, materiality is non-negotiable. Beauty of form, technical excellence, and fine materials take precedence over concept alone. He is fascinated by objects that have survived for centuries and the lives they have accumulated along the way. “Given one’s own brief existence, to imagine the lives of such works is itself an exercise of the mind,” he said. “Old works have the remarkable ability to grant access to people and ages that had long ceased to exist.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his favorite London institution is the Wallace Collection, whose French Régence and Louis XV holdings align closely with his own tastes. “I have told myself that should I die without an heir, all my earthly possessions will go to that august institution,” he said.
Wang also sees London’s historic art market as very much alive. He values the city’s auction houses for their breadth and accessibility, while its network of specialist dealers maintains a depth of expertise even as traditional dealerships become more private.
One of his favorite acquisitions captures the thrill of that market. Wang first encountered an English Chinoiserie silver tea caddy from 1758 at an American auction in 2015, but lost it to another bidder. When it resurfaced a decade later, he bought it.
The unknown collector who owned it in between had kept it in pristine condition. The two have never met, but for Wang, their connection through the object reflects the “unspoken camaraderie surrounding a thing of beauty” that makes collecting so compelling.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/9oanfXh
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