on discovering new artists, following a few rabbit holes, and the pleasure of looking.
alex prager, ceremony, 2026
i love discovering new artists.
actually, i love discovering new things full stop. earlier this week i discovered a band called westside cowboy and have been enjoying working my way through their music (check out the tracks kick stones (the boys), well done kid, you did it and coyote, bloody brilliant!).
it's a similar feeling with art. something catches my eye, i immediately want to know more, and before i know it i've spent an hour googling the work of someone i’d never heard of that morning.
frieze london is pretty good for this (auctions are also great). there are plenty of familiar names, of course, but one of the things i enjoy most about walking around the fair is coming across artists whose work i've never seen before. sometimes it's an immediate reaction; other times i'm not entirely sure why i've stopped, only that i have.
there is, admittedly, a slight downside to this particular hobby. the artists who catch my eye at frieze tend not to be the sort whose work i can casually pop on a credit card and take home. sadly. but that's not really the point. i enjoy the discovery, the looking, and then finding out more about the artist and what else they've made. and what’s three weeks of crying myself to sleep every night anyway? i can do it all again in 12 months’ time.
here are the five works that caught my eye this year.
yan pei-ming — wild majesty, blue, 2025
a big blue lion. that was what stopped me.
we're so used to seeing lions in shades of gold and tawny brown, against the scorched earth of the african savannah, that yan pei-ming's decision to paint one in blue immediately changes how you look at it.
i loved the unexpectedness of it. the brushwork is loose and expressive, giving the lion a real sense of movement, but it's the colour that stayed with me. why blue? what happens when you take an animal we think we know so well and present it in a completely different way?
i've always thought that one of the best things about looking at art is being reminded that there isn't just one way of seeing something. this painting was a good example. i found myself wanting to explore more of yan pei-ming's work, which is generally a pretty good sign that a painting has done its job.
and then there’s the back catalogue, which is crazy. prolific, varied and absolutely fantastic. giant portraits of the pope, obama, bruce lee, mao, the mona lisa, picasso… i mean, what’s not to like? if you enjoy a larger-than-life portrait (who doesn’t?), i suspect you’ll have as much fun exploring yan pei-ming’s work as i have.
alex prager — ceremony, 2026
there's a lot going on here. to put it mildly.
at first glance, there's a crowd of characters who appear to be looking at something, although nobody seems to be looking in quite the same direction. what have they all gathered to watch? whatever it is, they're not watching the same thing.
then you start noticing the details. the women with elongated noses, the mannequins, the outfits, the goggle eyes, the expressions. the whole thing has the feel of a film set, a fashion shoot and an acid trip of a dream/nightmare rolled into one. there's something wonderfully theatrical about it all, but also something distinctly odd.
i could happily have spent much longer looking at this work, trying to figure out who the people were and what was going on just outside the frame. but I couldn’t, becasue frieze is massive and if you snooze, you lose. and get very tired in my case 😀
i like art that gives you plenty to look at without necessarily giving you all the answers. ceremony certainly did that, and it sent me off to find out more about alex prager and her work. and it’s all great. and colourful. and a bit weird (in a good way). check her out.
choi yoonhee — a gust of wind blows from the fan #1, 2026
this one had a rather different effect on me. it’s a very different kind of painting to what usually attracts me, but I couldn’t stop looking at it.
the painting is made up of flowing layers of colour, and i initially found myself wondering what i was looking at. water? layers of rock? the sky? it seemed to hover somewhere between abstraction and landscape, suggesting things without quite settling into any of them.
i confess that i only read the title afterwards. a gust of wind blows from the fan #1 gave me another way of thinking about the painting, although i'm not sure it made me any more certain about what i was seeing.
and that's part of what i liked about it. the title might offer a clue, but the painting doesn't need me to work it out. i could simply enjoy the colours, the movement and the sense of calm it created.
it's also a useful reminder (to me as well) that not every work needs to grab you with an arresting image or a complicated narrative. sometimes it's enough to stand in front of something and enjoy looking at it.
laura footes — natural causes, 2026
this was one where i immediately started making up a story.
the central character is (to me at least) a businessman away on a trip, perhaps somewhere exotic, and no doubt with an unsuspecting family back home. the women (or is it one women depicted in multiple positions?) around him appeared to be there for his entertainment. it's a rather seedy scene but at the same time i find it quite sexy and there's something ghostly about the figures that makes the whole thing feel dreamlike.
what caught my eye was the movement. the central figure seems caught in a moment (and later slumped on the floor), while the woman (or women) move around him. she (or they?) feel present and absent at the same time.
i found myself wondering about the circumstances of the encounter, the lives of the people in the painting and what might happen once the scene was over. of course, that's my interpretation, and not necessarily what laura footes intended. but i like being able to make my own interpretation of a work, even if i've got the story completely wrong!
again, the painting left me with questions, and i wanted to know more about the artist. laura footes’ shtick is definitely dreamy/ghostly/sexy and a little bit disturbing. whatever her motivations, she is a fantastic painter.
karolina jabłońska — taking a head out of a jar, 2026
it's not every day you come across a painting of someone taking a head out of a jar. more’s the pity.
there's something wonderfully weird about this work. the subject matter is unexpected, the image is disturbing (and raises lots of questions), and the colour palette makes it all the more compelling - what is that liquid? olive oil?. it's a painting, in my opinion, that makes you look twice, three times and even a fourth. partly because you're intrigued and partly because you're trying to work out quite what you're looking at.
i like that combination. there's no obligation to find a work beautiful in the conventional sense, and not everything that interests us has to be immediately comfortable or easy to explain. sometimes the strangeness is the attraction.
i’ve always had a penchant for artworks that challenge in one way or another - i’ve got a banksy napalm at home (mickey mouse and ronald mcdonald holding hands with 9-year-old Phan thi Kim phuc, an appropriation of nick ut’s prize-winning photograph from the vietnam war), as well as a jonathan yeo leaf study, a collage of leaf shapes cut from adult magazines).
and this head in a jar painting would slot alongside those seamlessly.
as with the other works here, i found myself wanting to know more about the person who made it and what else she has done. one painting had caught my attention; now i wanted to see where else her imagination might take me.
unsurprisingly, it took me to some bizarre places, exactly where i’d hoped it would.
the joy of finding something new
looking back at these five works, it’s clear that they don’t have much in common, beyond the fact that they all made me stop and stare.
it's a fairly eclectic selection, even by my standards.
but that's exactly what i enjoy about discovering new artists. i don't want to arrive at an art fair knowing precisely what i'm looking for, and i don't want to spend the day ticking off familiar names (although frieze did have lots of my favourites - george condo, julian opie, tracey emin, billy childish, kathleen ryan, sarah lucas, alex Katz, antony gormley, Grayson Perry and anish kapoor).
some of the most interesting experiences come from stumbling across something new.
and while i'd be delighted to own any of these five works, i'm unlikely to be doing so any time soon. fortunately, discovering art doesn't have to end with a purchase.
much like discovering a new band, you can enjoy the experience, explore the back catalogue and see where it takes you. every now and then, you might even discover something that changes the way you look at art altogether.
for me, that's one of the great pleasures of collecting, whether or not you actually buy anything.
and if all this talk of discovering artists has made you want to start exploring for yourself, you can take a look at the works i've brought together at luck contemporary.
you never know what might catch your eye.