LONDON.- Today, Fair Play Art Fair announces the 65 artists selected to exhibit at the inaugural edition of the artist-first art fair. Organised around a merit-led model, the Fair removes booth fees for participating artists, offering the opportunity to sell work directly to collectors.
Taking place at One Marylebone from 15–18 October 2026, the artist list has been selected by an expert committee from respected voices across the art and cultural world: Kate Bryan (Chief Art Director at Soho House), Jo Baring (Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art), Lison Sabrina Musset (Curator and Co-founder of The Collective Makers), and Buchanan Studio (Multidisciplinary design practice). Chosen from an open call, the exhibiting artists represent a wide range of artistic practices and career stages, bringing together established artists, emerging practitioners and graduates alike from across London, the UK and around the world to share the platform together.
• 70% of participating artists are women
• Over 60% have held solo exhibitions, showcasing market-ready talent with established track records
• The lineup spans 15+ countries, including Thailand, Bahrain, Vietnam, Iran, Nigeria, Ghana, South Korea, Poland, France, Argentina, Chile, and the USA
• Over 40% are alumni of world-leading London art schools (including RCA, CSM, The Slade, and Goldsmiths), with over 65% trained across the wider UAL ecosystem and London fine art academies
• Featured works encompass a diverse range of media, from painting and sculpture to digital, photography and installation
• With artworks pricing starting at 200 Fair Play offers an affordable entry point for visitors looking to start a collection
Ryan Stanier, Founder of Fair Play, says “Our debut lineup for Fair Play Art Fair highlights the extraordinary strength of contemporary talent. I am thrilled to bring these artists together and provide a direct platform for them to connect, engage, and sell directly to collectors and art lovers alike.”
Kate Bryan, Selection Committee Member and Chief Art Director Soho House, says, “The quality of the applications and the strength of the final artist line up demonstrates how relevant and necessary Fair Play is. I’m really looking forward to seeing the artists out in full force showcasing some of the brightest names working today.”
Lison Sabrina Musset, Curator and Co-Founder of The Collective Makers, says, “I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the selection process. It was a wonderful opportunity to encounter such a diverse range of artists, practices and perspectives, and the consistently high calibre of the work made the process both stimulating and rewarding.”
Jo Baring, Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art, says “What I like about Fair Play is the transparency of it. Artists take on no financial risk. There are no upfront fees, so nobody has to gamble on their own success before they've even started. That creates real opportunity for people at the start of their careers. It's the same principle behind my work at the Ingram Prize: give emerging artists a genuine platform and let the work speak for itself, rather than asking them to pay their way in.”
Charlotte Buchanan of the multidisciplinary design practice Buchanan Studio says, “It's been a huge pleasure to see such a fresh perspective through the work of these 70 artists. It's an exciting, dynamic group and we're excited for them to be discovered by a new generation of collectors.”
THE BODY AND IDENTITY
At the heart of the Fair, a number of the artists address the body, identity and intimacy, bringing together an exploration of lived experience. From the paintings of Ingram Prize finalist (2025) Jennifer Nieuwland who is “interested in the potential of paint to encode and activate sensation”, which navigate the weirdness and vulnerability of living in a body through metaphor and symbolism, to the abstract art of Daisy Billowes who has a fascination for mythological women, the display unites distinctly different, imaginative perspectives.
The bright sculptures of Ditte Blohm extrapolate the complexities of motherhood and familial relationships whilst Marcelina Amelia draws on her Polish heritage and childhood memories to depict blended folklore with contemporary narratives, in her multidisciplinary works, including acrylic paintings on raw cotton canvas.
Meanwhile, Kwinnie L draws on mythology, folklore and oral histories in an ongoing world-building project ‘The Land of the Tattooed’, the name borrowed from an ancient state of Vietnam: “As a practitioner of skin marking, my work aligns with revival efforts of the Vietnamese tatu tradition”. The tattoo markings are displayed on textiles, through the use of a sewing needle.
Queer perspectives are explored through the paintings of Gavin Dobson, which have no set starting point and are created fresh onto the canvas. Curtis Holder's tender, dialogue-led graphite and coloured pencil portraits and figurative works on paper bring visibility to people whose stories are often overlooked. He was winner of the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year (2020) and recipient of The John Ruskin Prize (2024).
Expanding on identity through the lens of lineage and place, a number of artists draw from familial archives and diasporic heritage to navigate memory and belonging. Leily Moghtader Mojdehi weaves inspiration from ancient traditions through densely layered collage compositions that tell stories of unplaceable experiences, and London-based Iranian interdisciplinary artist Shirin Fathi’s photography questions inherited narratives around identity, power and transformation.
Through painting and textile, multidisciplinary artist Yasser Claud-Ennin draws on family archives and inherited West African textiles from his Nigerian-Ghanaian heritage to consider how memories are carried across generations, transformed by distance. Patrick Morales-Lee’s paintings depicting faces and figures “consider how identity is constructed through lived experience, shaped in part by the tension of having both a birth mother and an adoptive mother”.
Ingram Prize winner (2021) James Dearlove, presents paintings with twilit, hallucinatory worlds haunted by the presence of the human figure, often using newsprint, layout paper or newspaper stuck onto the canvas.
Working largely from photographs and the unconscious, Geraldine Swayne creates atmospheric, figurative paintings where faces and bodies merge into expressive amalgams, charged with quiet psychological drama.
MATERIALITY AND THE PROCESS OF MAKING
A number of artists place materiality and the process of making at the heart of their work, using traditional craft methods or innovative ways of presenting new works.
Laetitzia Campbell employs embroidery to explore how personal and collective histories are shaped through small fragments. Photographs, stories, textiles and inherited objects are transformed into tactile heirlooms.
Scarlett Bowman creates collage and assemblage pieces in soft colour palettes, using fragmented shapes that loosely resemble the everyday ephemera removed from their original context, creating entirely new narratives. Calder MacKay also incorporates found materials such as archival and digital imagery to create paintings with shifting, distorted layers that reflect on the tension of a generation suspended between cynicism and hope.
Jozef Michalski interrogates the post-digital condition, using computational code, AI, file corruption, and warped digital archives to reflect on contemporary overstimulation. The resulting works operate as “fake paintings, digital constructs, and material translations of damaged image-states, in which all media is absorbed into the digital”.
Found materials also appear within the work of Steve McPherson who, since 2007, has made his primary source material the discarded plastic objects that wash ashore on his local Kent coastline, resulting in sculptural pieces replicating archaeological aesthetics.
Mark Stuart Powell’s artistic process can be seen within his use of the bic pen to render highly detailed portraits and wildlife studies directly onto vintage and antique ephemera, including centuries-old letters, maps and newspapers.
Hands-on physical engagement is used also by Tim Noble in his playful sculptures, Li Ramet in her use of embroidery, stitching, and text as both visual and poetic elements, and Eleanor Turnbull casting directly from the landscape of Cornwall, where she is based, to create sculptures that use experimental techniques.
Barbara Kuebel’s large size handprinted woodcuts on paper, mostly drawing directly with the knives into the blocks and Poppy Lennox’s practice relies on working with wood, plaster, paint, earth, metal powders, beeswax, raw silk and thread: “I explore the human desire to seek pattern as a way of understanding the vastness and complexities of existence”.
Working between London and Bangkok, heritage crafts and structural design are subverted by Lisa King, recent participant of London Craft Week 2026, who brings traditional Indonesian batik into a contemporary space but is interested in challenging tradition, alongside Ines Fernandez de Cordova’s multi-stage printmaking and photopolymer etching that intends to nudge a memory within the viewer.
From Bahrain, Ghalia AbdulJawad's multidisciplinary approach moves fluidly between painting, printmaking, textiles, and sculptural work, using the oval as a repetitive motif. The collage structures of London and Lagos-based artist Lawrence Meju and Sabrina Brouwers uses elementary architectural forms through charcoal and aluminium, to create non-objective compositions that examine the psychological impact of visual simplicity and structure.
Paint itself is emphasised through process, through Marcus Aitken’s physical brushwork, Shelly Pamensky’s precarious automotive paints, Anton Byrne-Carter’s obscured historical imagery and Kirsty Bell’s trompe l’oeil manipulation of staged photographs. Lindsay Mapes also displays unhidden mistakes and fine-art embroidery, saying “I am especially interested in the idea of craft as fine art”, emphasising the intersection between the two.
Marina Priyomova’s layered paintings emerge from memories triggered by sound and vision, as the artist allows for certain musical compositions to unlock involuntary memories. Working on burlap, paint is layered over the raw texture of the material that is rooted in Ukrainian agrarian culture and the figures depicted continuously shift from form into complete abstraction.
NATURE, FANTASY AND IMAGINATION
Nature, fantasy and imagination also feature across the selection, including British-Chinese artist, Charlotte Mei, recipient of NOW Gallery's Future Space Award (2024), who has previously received commissions from Herms, Nike, Rimowa, Ferragamo, Beams Japan amongst other leading brands. Mei’s paintings depict blossoms and the natural world, luminous portraits, as well as subjects that have historically been dismissed as petty, decorative, feminine.
From South Korea, Sunju Jin - who is currently showing work as part of the exhibition The Sun and The Moon at the Saatchi Gallery - grounds their work in the study of 19th-century Korean folk painting (Minhwa), which historically channeled human desires and shifting social dynamics through symbolic imagery: “I seek to address the reverence for instincts that surge against gravity, the inner conflicts of human want, and the friction of desire between individuals”.
Similarly, Winner of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year (2019), Fujiko Rose also draws upon the natural world through her practice that is inspired by Japanese art, revolving around the use of ink, and detailing floral and interior scenes to examine the relationship between humans and nature.
Neal Camilleri brings a playful, surrealist lens to ceramic sculpture, crafting whimsical vessels that bridge the familiar and the imagined. Drawing on memories and fragments of the built environment, his works transform everyday structures into imaginative, lighthearted stories.
DREAMLIKE PHOTOGRAPHY
Moving away from works rooted in the materiality of the Earth, a selection of the artists lean into cosmic and surreal imagination, using long-exposure photography, space-age collages, and mycological dreamscapes to explore memory, nostalgia, and altered states of being.
Photography is notably used in order to capture nature, fantasy and imagination by a number of the artists. Marilyn Clark, based in France, uses long exposure photography to capture the blurred softness of nature, until it dissolves into pain. In the past, Clark has captured artists such as Julian Lennon, Jorja Smith, and Foals, and has been published in Vogue, ELLE, The Guardian, and Le Monde.
Seana Gavin’s work, primarily in the medium of collage and photography, uses found photographic material from vintage books to create otherworldly scenes, transforming them into dreamlike environments where the past and future coexist.
Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, Fei Alexeli uses her background in architecture, primarily working with photo-montages and photography. Her work blends retro aesthetics with cosmic imagination to create vibrant, dreamlike collages.
POETRY, LANGUAGE AND VISUAL ART
Treating language as a living thing and intersecting literature, oral history, and visual art, others explore storytelling through the combination of poetry and visual art. Robert Montgomery, known for his activist public installations, including commissions for War Child and a new public sculpture for St Giles Square in celebration of The Centrepoint Commission, will display works that explore the moments where painting and poetry collide, merging image and text into an expanded visual language.
Ralph Lazar takes poetry and prose into the realm of public activism and visual journalism, giving concrete form to text through urban billboard installations, daily headlines, and song lyrics.
Orlando Seale’s intertwining of painting and performance weave together songs, poems, and dramatic vignettes in a presentation of the inner figures that have marked the artist and Roxana Hartmann’s work moves between painting and writing, referring to it as an expression of the body in relationship with nature, as is it understood by Indigenous communities of the South American lowlands.
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Rounding out the lineup are artists with distinct focus areas spanning urban architecture, global travel and the built environment.
Gina Soden’s photography holds a preoccupation with abandoned structures and locations, the compositions featuring derelict asylums, long since closed schools, ex-military compounds and famous city power stations in various stages of decay.
Sachiyo Nishimura deconstructs the everyday built environment through modular photomontage, transforming overlooked urban infrastructure into abstract, mathematical compositions of graphic line and grid. A Bloomberg New Contemporaries alumnus and Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibitor, Nishimura strips cityscapes of local identity to reveal their underlying geometric codes.
Alec Cumming translates a pan-global map of travel across India, Sri Lanka, and California into vibrant, semi-abstract oil paintings, exploring how harsh, shimmering light defines everyday leisure scenes, city streets, and fleeting memories.
