The new generation of London artists to know

Corbin Shaw, 28, East London

Corbin Shaw

Ki Price

I work in traditional crafts, trying to make sense of the modern experience of living in this strange England that we’re in today.

On the London art scene:

I think a lot of artists in London get pigeonholed. You’re either a painter or a sculptor or all these rigid things. My brain can’t work like that. I want to be an artist where you go to a show and it feels like the British Museum. I don’t want to be summed up.

What do you hope people get from your work?

Funnily enough, somebody said to me recently, “I feel a real strange sense of national pride that I think you put a finger on quite well.” I’m proud to be English, but it’s a complicated relationship. I want to help people try to understand that relationship.

CORBIN SHAW IMAGES

Shaw is curating Feast of Fools, a group exhibition at the Groucho Club until November 14 @corbinshaww

Tom Hardwick Allan, 30, East London

Tom Hardwick Allan

Ki Price

I have a background in printmaking, but what I’m doing now is more like expanded printmaking, moving into sculptural territory with carved and cast reliefs. I’m using it on an analogous level to explore the phenomenon of imprinting, which is when a newly born or hatched animal comes to know itself.

On the London art scene:

The way that the capital dictates things can be so deadening — this privatisation of time and space. I think there are a lot of amazing things that are surviving despite that, but it’s despite, rather than because.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope they’re able to have an encounter with the work that prompts a recalibration. I feel like my best experiences with work reset me on some level.

Tom Hardwick Allan

Hardwick Allan is studying at the Royal Academy and spending Frieze, “trying to learn or unlearn something”. @tomhardwickallan

Okiki Akinfe, 27, London

Okiki Akinfe

Ki Price

I have my own lens, a black lens, which is my way of questioning what is allowed to be deemed important within our history. In contrast to that, I have what may be considered a sophisticated way of handling painting. It’s traditionalist, and I contrast that with cartoon imagery or hip hop references, contemporary elements.

On the London art scene:

I think the need to be specifically a figurative or abstract painter doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s very much moving in the direction of a personal story from the artist. I’m specifically interested in the topic of black Britishness.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope it opens people’s minds and encourages them to think about these references. I want people to go down the rabbit hole with me.

Okiki Akinfe

Ella Fleck, 33, Holloway

Ella Fleck

Ki Price

I work undercover a lot, pretending to be men online in sexual or seduction communities. For Frieze, I took a course for men training to be “chatters”, speaking on behalf of female OnlyFans creators. My alias was Elliot and I tried to make friends and observe the interactions. Not to make a point about men but out of curiosity for this peculiar world. From there, I make sensory installations, using sound and scent and vibration, trying to replicate the atmosphere of being in that experience.

On the London art scene:

I think it’s really exciting, there are so many different practices, strange hybrids of performance or sculpture. There is a lot of freedom.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I don’t want to be too didactic. I just lay it out and hope they get from it what they want. And have some questions.

www.robharrisphotographe​r.com

Fleck is showing at the Ehrlich Steinberg booth at Frieze @fleels

Marcus Jefferson, mid-thirties, London

Marcus Jefferson

Ki Price

I’m an anonymous artist, but I like to keep my work domestic. As much as people put me down as a conceptual artist, I want my work to be accessible. I always try to make work that can get people who have come from similar places to me — low income, social housing — more interested in the galleries. That’s always at the forefront of my mind.

On the London art scene:

It’s wild. But it can’t be that wild because I’ve infiltrated it. Now I’m inviting people to shows with people who didn’t get to come to shows growing up.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope they get the vibe that you can make art from anything. I want them to understand that it doesn’t always need some intellectual essay attached to it. You can like something because you like something.

Marcus Jefferson

Jefferson’s solo booth is exhibited at Harlesden High Street @marcjeff905

Amanda Moström, 35, Brockley and Albo

Amanda Mostrom

Ki Price

I’m a multidisciplinary artist, I make installations and work with a lot of varied materials. It comes back to things that I relate to, or want to relate to. I also work a lot with silent choreography — figuring out how you enter a room, for instance — so movement-orientated installation.

On the London art scene:

It’s such a love-hate relationship. It’s fast, it’s difficult, it’s exciting and as it stands currently it’s really wealthy. I could at least enter art when I was studying, but now I don’t think I could.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope that people just feel comfortable to be with the work. It’s such a big ask to want people to respond strongly to things. I want people to feel like they are welcome to have an in, an entry, and that they don’t feel alienated.

Courtesy the artist and Rose Easton, London Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards

A solo presentation with new work by Amanda Moström is at Rose Easton’s booth at Frieze @amandamostrom_

Lewis Hammond, 38, South-east London

Lewis Hammond

Ki Price

I’m a painter. I work in quite a traditional manner — oil on linen, canvas, panels — and the works are figurative. I paint recognisable things in the “easy” way, then there’s something slightly askew. One of my favourite pieces is an amalgamation of my mum and grandmother that’s quite dear to me. At some point I discarded the source imagery and conjured them from memory — there’s a surrealism there.

On the London art scene:

It’s vast and varied. Getting space in London just seems to be quite tough. But there’s a real mix of younger or artist-run spaces alongside blue-chip galleries.

What do you hope people get from your work?

’d enjoy it if there was an open, directed read of the work, and that the ambiguity requires them to complete that narrative loop.

2025 Tom Carter Photography

Hammond’s work is at The Hepworth Wakefield until November 1 @lewislhammond

Ella Lynch, 33, Tottenham

ELLA LYNCH

Ki Price

I mainly make sculptures. I use a lot of pop iconography and cultural references — things associated with celebrity, glamour, tackiness, trashiness, things that are deemed to be lowbrow, and I collage them together using found objects.

On the London art scene:

I didn’t come up through art school or the traditional art world scene. Most of the artists I’ve known and worked with I met in the nightlife scene: performers, costume makers, people more involved with clubs than galleries. That’s my art world, this vibrant network running alongside the inner circle of the art gallery world.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I want it to be amusing. I really enjoy when people pick up on all the little references I put in there. I want it to feel familiar and recognisable, but you can’t quite work out why.

Apple Photos Clean Up

Lynch has a residency at Selfridges during Frieze; her work Stripper’s Feet is on show until October 18 @_ella.lynch_

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings 35, London

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings

Ki Price

Quinlan: We’re a collaborative duo and we’ve worked together since we met on our Fine Art BA at Goldsmiths. We primarily work in fresco painting and egg tempera painting. One fresco is called Night and is a scene in a park with a group of gender-ambiguous people ready for a night out, but there’s an atmosphere of tension. We’re interested in how different people occupy public space and the different types of power there.

Hastings: Historically, frescos were used for religious imagery to impart moral guidance. We began to see them not as a reflection of how society truly was but how people in positions of power wanted society to function. Our work is thinking about and subverting those structures.

On the London art scene:

Hastings: We have an incredible network of peers, but it is increasingly challenging to get by as an artist in London. The pressure is ramping up because so much funding has been removed. It makes sense to decentralise art funding but the London scene is feeling the impact.

What do you hope people get from your work?

Hastings: We’re conscious of making work that is generous to the viewer. We want it to be beautiful and draw you in.

Quinlan: When we started we had the feeling that every artwork had to serve a purpose, disrupt something or activate it. Now we’re more confident the work can exist in its own world.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings

Alex Margo Arden, 32, Croydon

Alex Margo Arden

Ki Price

I work primarily in research projects and what I make includes sculpture, performance, painting, drawing and installation, with each project determining its own form. In my practice I’m interested in interrogating value, authorship and the processes through which histories are constructed and historicised.

On the London art scene:

London is such a special city, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived. It has such a vibrancy and vitality, an energy like no other. What a beautiful melting pot of so much culture, experience, ideas, and passion. London is a city of artists.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I really hope people find my projects to be conversation starters, places to think from. I think art galleries should be discursive places, places we raise questions, places we express thoughts aloud. In the gallery, we discuss the art in front of us, and our feelings, and bring our own knowledge into the space.

Art is such an incredible springboard to generate really profound and meaningful conversations. Galleries shouldn’t be silent spaces. These are spaces to express ourselves as an audience as much as artists.

Alex Margo Arden, Jigsaws, 2026

Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

Arden’s exhibition Nothing Personal is at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation until January 27 @olddrag

Mia Wilkinson, 35, east London

Mia Wilkinson

Ki Price

I paint figures in a domestic sphere and engage with the relationship of gender, class, identity and labour. My practice also extends into sculpture and drawing, based on my upbringing in County Durham and personal experiences. But the figures make use of excess, they’re cloaked in humour as a way to enter difficult topics of discussion. My work starts with my own personal specific experiences but then it becomes quite abstract. Disgust and pleasure go hand in hand in the works. It’s about the body and gender, the body and politics. When dealing with the female body, humour is a huge way to connect and to cope. It’s a coping mechanism to deal with hard things, but also a way to express yourself truthfully.

On the London art scene:

Everyone is so different and it’s exciting seeing what other artists are doing. Although we can all be a bit shy. Making art often involves spending an extraordinary amount of time alone in a room, so opportunities to meet and engage discussion are really valuable.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I’m not interested in prescribing how people should respond to my work. Humour is a way into difficult subjects. Why shouldn’t women be funny, grotesque, vulgar or completely ridiculous? There is pleasure in being excessive and rebellion in refusing to behave. I want people to laugh, even when they are feeling slightly uncomfortable.

Mia Wilkinson

Wilkinson is artist-in-residency at the art’otel Hoxton until October 31. Follow @mia__wilkinson

Ella Turner-Bridger, 28, Bloomsbury

Ella Turner Bridger

Ki Price

I was previously working in film, but I had my first performance work last year [709 Reckoning at Bolding Gallery], which was a big deal for me. It gave me a new language. It’s so extreme to shove myself in the middle and do something wild and dangerous. It’s like a desire to be out there but also to be embarrassed. Wanting to be seen and not wanting to be seen. This strange denial, shame, frustration loop. It’s therapeutic and ritualistic. I’m working on my next performance, which involves a skirt made out of cameras. They’re all pointed outwards, filming, and my skirt will be spinning about videoing the audience.

On the London art scene:

I don’t know if it’s to do with me feeling more like an artist than I ever have and suddenly being now super aware, but there’s pretty good art at the moment, and a freshness. It feels like a frustration that’s like being released. I think we’ve been quite frustrated for a long time. I think I’ve realised you can only feel like that for so long before something snaps.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope they feel odd and good and bad.

All of that. My brother had a good take on the first performance. He said, “It’s about masturbation.”

Ella Turner-Bridger

Rene Matić, 29, south-east London

Rene Matic

Ki Price

My work is mostly concerned with organising images. In all their differing forms. I think most people know me for taking photos.

I’m interested in the people that I love. I look at how we learn to survive within the conditions that we are burdened with. The modes of care from the margins, how we keep each other safe. At the club, the protest, the party and the peaceful times in between.”

On the London art scene:

There are so many differing, converging scenes! In my head, I like to think of everyone together smoking inside pubs, passionately discussing the work and the research and disagreeing but kissing each other on both cheeks. One can dream!

What do you hope people get from your work?

Love, for sure. Just love and an appreciation of the generosity of the people around me, because it’s hard to show the whole of you. And I’m very fortunate that my friends and my loved ones are so generous with themselves, with me.

Rene Matić,

Rene Matić is included in the Sixth New Museum Triennial: The Outside Expands, in New York, opening February 4 and running until May 16 @rene.matic

George Rouy, 32, Kent

George Rouy

Ki Price

I’m predominantly a painter working with figuration. When I left university, it felt like figurative painting was almost irrelevant. To locate what I wanted to achieve, I had to reduce it down, strip away all the symbolic aspects, the clothes, the surroundings, so they exist in a liminal space. It’s about the internalised representation of ourselves, the psyche, but the physical as well, and how we exist autonomously but as collectives. I engage with collage, photography and the screen, too. I’m also working on a project called Bodysuit with the choreographer Sharon Eyal, which will be in Paris next month — a contemporary dance performance, with a music installation and a huge painting.

On the London art scene:

What I always admire is the relentlessness of artists and the way that they endlessly find ways to create. Being moved out of studios, being moved out of areas because it’s too expensive… there is still this real will.

What do you hope people get from your work?

If they can walk away from it feeling inspired. It’s such a weird, vague word but it’s such a great feeling when you walk out of a show feeling like it was wild or made them uneasy but energised. That’s what I want. When they trusted the experience.

DAMIAN-GRIFFITHS

Rouy’s exhibition REPRISE is showing at Hauser & Wirth, New York, until October 17. Rouy’s work is also on view at Hastings Contemporary as part of Edge: Where the Land Meets the Sea, until January 3. @georgerouy

Hettie Inniss, 26, Whitechapel

Hettie Innis

Ki Price

I challenge myself a lot in my paintings. I’m handling materials that are quite unpredictable and there are many technical things to consider when you’re trying to get consistency. It feels like a dialogue between me and the material. I’ve actually been using the practice as a way of liberating myself from my identity. I examine memory, playing with what that looks like, to build these compositions. It’s very intuitive. I will have a compositional plan but it never ends up looking like I want it to. But that’s the fun of it. It’s part of the practice, this performance of memory where there’s pockets of information that then dissolve.

On the London art scene:

Some of my friends and peers are doing amazing work and it’s such an exciting time to just be able to witness them. It feels as though there is a lot bubbling right now.

What do you hope people get from your work?

I hope that people just spend time with them. What I find really beautiful about painting is you can look at the best works for hours and find something new. I think a lot of my work centres around slowing down time and trying to be present. I’d love it if there’s an opportunity for someone to have that experience with my work.

Hettie Inniss 'Rooted'

Hettie Inniss

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