Choose Love has announced its auction to raise funds for humanitarian aid in Palestine. The auction, which runs from 26 March to 9 April 2026, will see the work of contemporary artists go on public exhibition before being sold to the highest bidder.

The artists include Sarah Ball, Jake Chapman, Es Devlin, Jeremy Deller, Brian Eno, Nan Goldin, Misan Harriman, Charlie Mackesy, Malak Mattar, and Grayson Perry, among others.

Choose Love art auction raises funds for Together for Palestine

The exhibition and auction follow the Together For Palestine concert (17 September 2025) at Ovo Arena, London, which raised over £2m for humanitarian organisations. For the auction, Choose Love has partnered with Gideon Berger Studio, London art space Hope 93 (where the public exhibition will be displayed) and British Palestinian art dealer Zayna Al-Saleh.

The auction will include Es Devlin’s Redraw The Edges of Yourself; Grayson Perry’s ceramics work Lady with Fireworks; Jeremy Deller’s new work with Ed Hall, The Constant Buzz of a Drone; two works by Khaled Hourani, Watermelon Flag and Kendaka; and Nablus by Nabil Anani.

Since 2015, Choose Love has worked across 50 countries to support people in times of crisis, providing daily essentials and trying to ensure that displaced families and individuals have what they need to rebuild their lives. The funds of this initiative will go towards food and water, healthcare, shelter, mental health support and Taawon, the largest orphan care programme in Gaza.

‘In these turbulent and frightening times, it’s more important than ever that we put humanity first, and make sure families and children have what they need to survive,’ says Josie Fernandez-Marelli, CEO of Choose Love. ‘There is still an urgent need to support vital organisations providing humanitarian aid on the ground in Gaza. We are proud to stand with Together For Palestine, and deeply grateful to every artist for their contributions, supporting our partners to save as many lives as possible.’

The Choose Love auction will be open for bids from 26 March – 9 April and an exhibition of the works included will be open to the public at Hope 93 in London over the same period.

It is 1972, and Miss World is everywhere. Sculptor and performance artist Andrew Logan, meanwhile, has spent the day at Crufts Dog Show. He wonders, what would happen if you were to combine the two, blending swimwear and evening wear criteria with the poise demanded of the well-behaved hounds? And lo, Alternative Miss World is born.

Contestants in the first Alternative Miss World stood on a stage of vegetable boxes in Logan’s studio, in a bid to impress judges including David Hockney. Its reputation ballooned – the following year, people squeezed through the windows to get in. In 1978, Logan went public, renting Clapham Common for £200 for the event. Judges vied for a spot – so far, co-hosts and contestants have included Divine, Leigh Bowery, Zandra Rhodes, Jarvis Cocker, Derek Jarman, Brian Eno and Grayson Perry. Events were themed, becoming a massive party. For 1978’s extravaganza, the circus theme was resided over by Logan in full regalia. Judges, perched in lion cages, led proceedings alongside guest of honour Divine. Filmmaker Richard Gayer was on hand to record the spectacle.

Gayer’s finished film was scheduled to premiere the same evening as the Miss World televised event. But competition organiser Eric Morley had a different idea, putting a stop to the planned showing with a threatened litigation, arguing Logan was not entitled to use the Miss World name. Ignoring an invitation to a private screening from the filmmakers, the case went to court.

The filmmakers hired the barristers they could afford, including one Tony Blair, future prime minister and then in the early stages of his legal career. He didn’t utter a word the whole trial, says Logan. But, ‘I do remember him for his teeth. Wonderful teeth. Great big smile.’

The judge agreed if the public confused the two events it would be financially and reputationally damaging to Miss World, and granted an injunction – the filmmakers could go ahead, but couldn’t use Miss World in the title. When their promotional bus arrived, it advertised ‘The Alternative’ with ‘Miss World’ casually crossed off.

The case returned to court. Logan wore a jacket made of pieces of disco balls, as well as an eye brooch that winked at the judge throughout. This time, they won, with the judge noting it wasn’t a film about beautiful girls, but a film of the grotesque. But, the distributors were spooked, and the film didn’t go ahead – although, 50 years later, Logan and Alternative Miss World are still going strong.

It’s a great story, and one which continues to resonate, particularly with filmmakers Maya Avidov and Savannah James-Bayly, who tell the story in documentary short, Too Disgusting to be Confused, which will premiere at Raindance Film Festival ahead of its launch.

The duo got to know Logan before, picking out the strands of the story in the creation of a comprehensive narrative. ‘He's so good on camera,’ says Avidov. ‘He’s very charismatic and very happy to be there. He's totally happy in the present and happy to talk about the past. I’d say the hardest part was letting go. There's so much to tell.’

‘We were very lucky in that we managed to get in touch with Richard Gayer, who made the film that caused the backlash, and he was able to fill in a lot of the gaps,’ adds James-Bayly. ‘There was no shortage of content. Our initial cut was much longer than 12 minutes.’

Too Disgusting to be Confused is part of the Netflix Documentary Talent Fund 2025. All films from this year's cohort will be premiering at Raindance Film Festival on the 26th June

The films will be available to stream on Netflix’s Still Watching YouTube Channel from 27th June 2025

What is London art to you? Is it the haunted faces from Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, ripped from a city at war? Or perhaps a punkish spirit reigns, in Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Slawn’s bold streaks of colour and Yinka Shonibare’s playful motif? Or perhaps it’s all of them, in which case Saatchi Yates’ celebration of London is calling your name.

Beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new exhibition, ‘Once Upon a Time in London’, gathers established and emerging artists in an eclectic consideration of London’s impact on the cultural landscape. For gallery founders Arthur Yates and Phoebe Saatchi Yates, who upon opening the space in 2020 were told that London’s art scene had been overtaken by Paris and Milan, it feels like a defiant return to form.

Works from artists including David Hockney, George Rouy, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Michael Armitage, Jade Fadojutimi, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili and Bridget Riley trace Britain’s artistic movement from post-war, through recessions and pandemics, to Brexit and onwards. There’s a party spirit throughout, and a packed programme of events and collaborations; highlights include a catalogue overseen by Norman Foster, the launch of St John x Saatchi Yates’ wine, and a mischievous Nicky Haslam art-world tea towel.

Art on show is an eclectic mix, with a rethinking of traditional mediums key throughout. Contemporary moments, such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic reworkings of figurative painting, join a classic rethinking of genre, seen in the subversive female figures in Jenny Saville’s graduation show. Seen together, the works are a triumphant love letter to London’s best bits. ‘As a gallery, we want to build a dialogue between the art world and the public,’ say the founders.

'Once Upon a Time in London' is at Saatchi Yates, 12 June - 17 August 2025, saatchiyates.com

‘When I met Grayson Perry, I like to say I was a burnt out celebrity photographer,’ says photographer Richard Ansett. ‘I was dreading another ego that was going to drain me of my soul and energy. And of course, I met this fascinating subject, and I was very interested in exploring where the authenticity was.’

It marked the beginning of a fruitful partnership, the results of which are now the subject of a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s. ‘A Portrait of Grayson Perry,’ features photographs taken over the course of their more than decade-long working relationship.

Ansett first met with Perry in 2013 at the Tate Modern, and the resulting portrait was immediately acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. ‘Grayson was suddenly meeting a photographer that wasn't responding in the way that he was used to photographers responding to him,’ says Ansett. ‘I'm not particularly kind, or particularly interested in putting you at ease. I'm slightly abrupt, and he’s clutching at his handbag, looking like he's about to be mugged. But before that first portrait I went online and Googled him, and all I found was these sort of beaming photographs – and I was like, this is a very serious, important artist in a dress. And I think my queerness comes into play there as well. I was thinking about what would be an interesting portrait for me to do with him. I think that's true of Grayson. He allows you to project whatever you want onto him. He's a very interesting character in that sense, you think he's something, but it's mostly your projection.’

It is rare for Ansett to return to a subject after taking their portrait – ‘as a younger photographer, I used photography of a way of exploring intimacy with my subjects, and then just running away and disappearing, never really returning to the scene of the crime,’ he says – and with Grayson, the success of the first portrait raised the stakes. But unite they did, and their working relationship over the years has become increasingly collaborative, the culmination of mutual trust and respect visible in the playful results.

‘It all comes from Grayson,’ Ansett adds. ‘He says, What do you want? He's incredibly impatient of indecision, because he doesn't have a lot of time, but he wants you to say how you would do it. What do you want to do? And he'll say yes or no to it. With the concept, I started to have the opportunity to create work which I always knew could be bigger than what they were being used for. So Birth, for instance, of him holding the baby, I just had this vision of something that could be great if we could pull it off. I'm hugely driven, and I think that's one of the reasons why I get on very well with him. When I’m with a camera, I'll burn your house down to get a great photograph. He responds very well to that, because he knows that's the only thing that matters between us in that moment is me getting a picture, and even he can't get in the way of that.’

The photographs here, from Birth and Death to Land of Hope and Glory, encapsulate Perry’s ability to both shine a light on his success and power, while simultaneously unpicking it. ‘I think I am a portraitist, but I still like to document and explore someone's personality within that permission that they've given me,’ Ansett says. ‘And I think even behind all the makeup and the frocks, I'm still looking for complexity.’

A Portrait of Grayson Perry is at Sotheby’s from 28 March - 17 April. Tickets for a panel discussion on 31 March are available here

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur is at The Wallace Collection from 28 March-26 October 2025

Grayson Perry’s tapestries, vases and intricate drawings rarely reach monumental scales, and aside from his architectural House for Essex, he doesn't often unveil permanent public art projects. 

Perry’s first public artwork in London, Inspiration Lives Here, 2022, welcomes visitors to the concrete complex at A House for Artists, illuminating the entrance passage in a lamp-come-monument. 

A House for Artists is an artists’ living space commissioned by Create London and completed in 2021, providing flexible dwellings for 12 creatives and their families. Its concrete structure is made up of cubic and triangular forms and holds both public- and private-facing utilities. Its diverse housing model – designed by London-based architecture studio Apparata – has room for public arts programmes, studio spaces and indoor and outdoor communal living spaces, imagined for parties and co-working. 

Grayson Perry: Inspiration Lives Here

Contextualised by the communal space, Perry created the sculpture as an ode to social housing and, commissioned by Create London and funded by Art Fund, it is an emblem of the expanding arts programme in Barking & Dagenham. Referencing the history of the nearby Becontree Estate as a home to wartime heroes and workers from the local Ford factory, the lamp’s light spills from the windows of a house onto a Ford car and Transit van and (made from hand-painted Corten steel) is designed to visibly weather over time. 

On the shifting narrative surrounding art in the London borough, Marie Bak Mortensen, director of Create London explains that the project ‘continues our mission to dissolve traditional hierarchies between the art world and the everyday, bringing first-class art to areas where it is least expected’.

createlondon.org; artfund.org

Capturing art-world and creative figures at home in their living room, at their desks and by their windows, British photographer Joanna Vestey’s portraits are a marker of our strange times. Wearing their masks, her subjects, including Grayson Perry, Jenny Saville and Camille Walala, have been photographed as part of a series to raise money for art therapy charity, AT The Bus.

Before the most recent UK restrictions, Oxfordshire-born Vestey travelled across the country to document life under lockdown. Relying only on her tripod, camera and a stool, Vestey shot her subjects using only natural light, creating portraits that are remarkable in their intimacy.

The masked portraits are now on sale as limited-edition prints in an auction that aims to raise £150,000 for the art therapy programme delivered by AT The Bus.

Based inside a double-decker bus with custom-built studio spaces, the programme runs creative sessions for young people aged 7 to 18 during term time. The bus, whose exterior was designed by Walala, takes up residence in school grounds across Oxfordshire and London throughout the year, providing a safe space for students to attend classes where they learn to create and transform objects.

With young people’s mental health being heavily impacted by the pandemic, the opportunities offered by the programme are more vital than ever.

‘AT The Bus helps children rediscover their habits of creativity,’ says Saville, a patron of the charity. ‘The process of being utterly present in the moment, where all your concentration is given to a particular creative task – it’s when humans play their best game, can love life, and themselves.’

Alongside Saville, Perry and Walala, the impressive line-up of portraits includes Joy Labinjo, Zandra Rhodes, Richard Wentworth, Fiona Banner, Philippa Perry, Dawn French and Cornelia Parker.

Each limited-edition print is signed and is part of a run of only 50, costing £150 per print and available to purchase at atthebus.org.uk. The funds raised from the project will enable AT The Bus to deliver 5,000 hours of art as therapy.

INFORMATION

See the full limited edition portrait series at atthebus.org.uk

Home to tycoons, tennis stars, and the Swarovski’s winter residence, a 412-acre luxury estate in south Florida is not the first place you’d expect to find Grayson Perry’s transvestite alter-ego Clare gallivanting in a golf buggy. Nonetheless, she (and he) arrived this weekend at Windsor in a ferociously pink, bum-covering mini-dress and purple platforms, for the inaugural exhibition of a three-year partnership between Windsor and the Royal Academy of Arts (RA).

The partnership is the brainchild of Christopher le Brun, president of the RA, who staged an exhibition of his own work at The Gallery at Windsor last January. In doing so, he formed a bond with the resort’s founders – Canadian retail moguls the Westons, in particular Mrs Hilary Weston, who serves as The Gallery’s creative director. She’s a force to be reckoned with, having previously spearheaded Windsor exhibitions of Alex Katz, Ed Ruscha and Peter Doig.

Installation view of ‘Making Meaning’ at the Windsor, Florida.

Le Brun, along with Royal Academy of the Arts artistic director Tim Marlow, presented Mrs Weston with a shortlist of Academicians for her to choose from. ‘I visited each artist’s studio and knew Grayson would be a good choice,’ Mrs Weston explains. ‘But my daughter – who founded this gallery 16 years ago – questioned my decision. She thought Grayson’s work might not be quite right for the members here. But I told her, “Not only is he a very exciting artist, but the audience here at Windsor is very sophisticated. They’re going to be thrilled.”’

Whether she’s right is the question on everybody’s lips – except Clare’s bright red ones. Though Perry has only had one solo exhibition in the States (at the decidedly less conservative Warhol Foundation in New York over a decade ago), he’s convinced he’ll find an admiring audience for his euphemistic, self-deprecating Anglophilia at Windsor. ‘They’ll lap it up,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to scare the horses too much. I’m under no illusion that a very big part of my job is to do very posh interior decoration, for big houses like the ones across the golf course here.’

Hold Your Beliefs Lightly, 2011, by Grayson Perry, computerised embroidery on cotton and silk

And he seems to be right. On opening night, approving ‘oohs’, ‘aahs’ (and occasional ‘hahas’) resonate out over the 19th hole. Curated by Victoria Miro’s Erin Mann, ‘Making Meaning’ is a succinct survey of Perry’s oeuvre, so titled, says Perry, ‘because life is meaningless, and it’s our job as artists to make meaning out of it.’ It features examples of his ceramics, sketches, cast-iron figures and monumental tapestries, each imbued with Perry’s stealthy cultural commentary. 

Identity, defining selfhood and ‘our curmudgeonly, cynical, joyful, odd, Britishness’ are overriding themes. Take the giant tapestry of a £10 note – Comfort blanket (2014) – embroidered with stereotypical English phrases, oddities, and a giant portrait of the Queen’s face. Perry describes it as ‘a patchwork of Britishness’. Though local Windsor residents seem confused by what is meant by ‘Barratt Houses’, ‘allotments’ and a ‘nimby’, Perry is unphased if the work gets lost in translation. In fact, he celebrates it. ‘Maybe visitors here won’t get every reference of my very British mindset. But if you’re a white, middle class British man of a certain age, it’s good to “other” you, so to speak’, he says. ‘Often with identity, you’re never aware of it until it becomes an issue.’

Grayson Perry at the Windsor, Florida, 2018.

Initially, like Clare’s outre garb, the innate Britishness of the work – where the words ‘RAIN’ and ‘BITTER IRONY’ are front and centre – seems as if from another planet to its sun-drenched, self-satirising surroundings. But Clare’s larger-than-life demeanour, and the work’s raucous vibrancy, actually falls into step with its extravagant, filmset-like home. Like so much of what Perry does, the work is so far outside the box, it finds its way back in.

For years, he has catwalked between circles (or ‘tribes’ as he calls them) with enviable ease. One evening he’s an anti-establishment punk who hangs out with the likes of Boy George, the next he’s a populist TV face who hangs out with the likes of Christopher le Brun (a figure he comically caricatures in his work Bad Portraits of Establishment Figures, 2013). Like his £10 tapestry, he too is a ‘patchwork of Britishness’, able to present as male, transvestite, working class, middle class, starving artist and panel show politico – giving him a certain license to comment upon (and cajole) each demographic. Which he does with a heavily-lidded wink – a gentle teasing he calls a ‘provocation, but not a catastrophic one.’

Comfort Blanket, 2014, by Grayson Perry, tapestry

Now, adding to the list of identity cards in his pocket, he has decided to embrace the idea of being a national treasure. ‘If there’s one thing that appalls me it’s ageing rockers pretending they’re still rebels,’ he says. ‘Just because you’re a member of the establishment, doesn’t mean you can’t be thoughtful, break taboos and change society. After all, punks are pensioners now.’

In fact, gaining his national treasure status and increasing in popularity – something that only started happening in his late 30s – has served to push Perry’s work in new directions. ‘Popularity, particularly being on TV, bent me out of shape,’ he says. ‘It made me make work on things I would never have tried, had I just been producing what I wanted.’ For the last decade or so, his goal has been to broaden the arts audience, without dumbing it down (hence the title of his last, sell-out solo exhibition at Serpentine Galleries ‘The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever’). If his aim is to cast conceptually challenging art’s net wide, Windsor seems as good place as any, though he’s still convinced his entire audience comprises ‘art students and middle-aged women’.

The Island Of Bad Art, 2013, by Grayson Perry.

Despite this massive upswing in widespread and various popularity, Perry has not sacrificed his humility. In fact, he still struggles with self-confidence when it comes to his work – something that seems important to him. ‘I constantly worry, to this day, if I’ve made the right things,’ he offers. ‘It’s lovely to get praise. Everyone wants to be called a genius. But being a self-proclaimed genius is another matter. There’s one of the those 100 miles down the coast,’ he says, in a thinly-veiled allusion to Donald Trump.

But this is not an exhibition that overtly looks at American politics, or even British politics. Instead, it’s about looking inwards, and acknowledging the universally occuring weirdness that we find there. ‘In both Europe and America, we seem to be at a moment when we are examining ourselves, asking who we really are,’ says Mrs Weston. ‘Looking at Grayson’s thorough investigation of his identity will propel us to reflect on our own. This can only be a good thing.’

INFORMATION

‘Grayson Perry: Making Meaning’ is on view until 27 April. For more information, visit the Royal Academy of Arts website and the Windsor website

ADDRESS

The Gallery at Windsor
3125 Windsor Boulevard
Vero Beach
Florida

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A few years ago, the sleepy Essex village of Wrabness may have not stood out for its eye-catching contemporary architecture. That was before the launch of House for Essex, the new project by playful architecture practice FAT and Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry for holiday home rental company Living Architecture.

Clad in colourful relief tiles - produced by Shaws of Darwen, cast from originals created by Perry - and featuring three spires and a chequered chimney on its glistening golden roof, the house is a daring departure from small community’s existing building stock. Welcome to the world of Julie Cope.

An extraordinary collaboration of architecture and art, House for Essex was conceived as a shrine, dedicated to the fictional character of Julie Cope. So, explains the team, it was designed as a wayside and pilgrimage chapel, devoted to this secular ‘saint’. 'I have always been influenced by religious architecture,' says Perry. The living room’s banquette seating, for example, is a nod to the one in the Chartres cathedral.

Despite its eccentric external appearance, the interior is spread across two floors in a fairly traditional layout. The ground floor contains common areas, such as living room and kitchen, while bedrooms and main bathroom are placed upstairs.

Slightly less conventional is the house’s internal horizontal division. A street-facing entrance opens to a more domestic arrangement – both in terms of scale and use. A second door on the opposite end leads into the house’s double-height, formal, dramatic living room (the ‘chapel’). It is richly decorated with Perry’s tapestries, drawings, ceramics and sculpture, a complex and ornamental interior telling the story of Julie Cope’s life and death. 'We talked about the relationship of [the living room] and the rest of the house,' says FAT architect Charles Holland. 'You can almost inhabit them independently.'

Two small internal balconies jut out from the bedroom walls, looking into this central space. A stage-set easily comes to mind. A motorbike – Julie Cope, explains Perry, met an untimely death under the wheels of one – hangs theatrically from the ceiling. 'It is like being in a play,' says the artist.

House for Essex, which is also FAT’s last project (the firm announced its break-up in 2013), is now available for short-term letting via Living Architecture.

Art Basel swept into Hong Kong this week sparking a creativity frenzy that spread well beyond the 233 galleries showing in the city’s monolithic convention centre as everyone from up-and-coming young local designers to international galleries and fashion designers jumped on for the ride.

The winners were the public, who were treated to a series of world-class public installations in shopping centres across the city including Zhu Jinshi’s ‘Boat’, an intricate 15x3.5x4.2 metre immersive installation crafted from 10,000 sheets of Xuan paper, presented in Exchange Square.  At Central’s Landmark mall, local art collector and architect William Lim’s suspended plexiglass dome displayed nine important artworks valued at over US$ 19 million including a mesmerising portrait by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, while a set of telescopes enabling closer inspection of the works reflected on how contemporary art is viewed.

Across the harbour, the Peninsula Hotel turned tradition on its head with British sculptor Richard Wilson’s full-sized replica of a vintage twin-axel Harrington Legionnaire coach teetering rather alarmingly on the edge of the hotel’s 7th floor terrace. The installation, titled ‘Hang On A Minute Lads…I’ve Got A Great Idea’, replicated the final scene of the iconic film, The Italian Job.

Nearby, the city’s tallest building, the International Commerce Centre, exhibited Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei’s ‘Same Old, Brand New’ light show. Drawing inspiration from 1980s video games, images from Pac-Man and Tetris were projected onto the skyscraper’s futuristic façade.  A smartphone app allowed viewers to hear music while watching.

The city’s growing number of art galleries also upped their game with a stellar showing of works from French graffiti artist and photographer JR who exhibited several ethereal new pieces titled ‘Ghosts of Ellis Island’ at Galerie Perrotin, to Duddell’s ‘ICA Off-Site: Hong Kongese’ that reflected on the pace of urbanisation with a range of works including Shinro Ohtake’s intricate ‘Time Memory’ collage, Zeng Hong’s ‘Balcony’, and a miniature replica of Millie’s Centre Neon Sign courtesy of the M+ visual arts museum.

Meanwhile, in the rapidly gentrifying Sheung Wan district, Pearl Lam’s newest gallery dedicated to emerging artists unveiled an intriguing collection of architectural beeswax installations by the young Beijing artist, Ren Ri.  The beekeeper-artist ‘collaborates’ with bees, manipulating the formation of honeycombs to create organic sculptures and intricate maps of the world.

On the opposite side of Hong Kong island, one of Hong Kong’s strongest alternative art institutions Para Site opened a larger new space in Quarry Bay with ‘One Hundred Years of Shame – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations’.  Works include Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘When Harry Met Sally’ light box artwork and Firenze Lai’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Human Chain’ painting.

One of the strongest showings in town, however, was at the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed Asia Society in Admiralty, where Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘Life is Only One’ retrospective of paintings, sketches, photographs and installations offered a fascinating glimpse into the notoriously shy artist’s world.

A new satellite event - Art Central - also appeared on the scene this year, targeting a younger crowd with works like Stella Zhang’s all-white hand-sewn space installation for Galerie du Monde and Chinese ink painter Lan Zhenghui’s monumental paintings. The 10,000 square meter harbourfront tent designed by London-based architecture firm Stiff & Trevillion-designed was also home to local architect Joyce Wang’s ultra contemporary take on the traditional crystal chandelier for Swarovski.

Back at Art Basel, now under the direction of Adeline Ooi, visitors found the usual list of big-hitting names such as Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry, whose ‘Comfort Blanket’ tapestry generated considerable interest on opening night. David Zwirner Gallery, which presented a polychromed wood sculpture of Buster Keaton by Jeff Koons, and several enigmatic paintings by surrealist-realist painter Neo Rauch, also reported very strong sales.

This year, the Fair’s expanded Encounters Sector benefitted significantly from curation by Melbourne art expert Alexie Glass-Kantor who introduced 20 large-scale installations from 14 countries. The most noteworthy was Hong Kong-based artist Joao Vasco Paiva’s ‘Mausoleum’, a 5.6-metre tall installation of ubiquitous marketplace Styrofoam boxes cast in stone resin.

On the VIP Lounge front, Art Basel lead partner UBS went beyond providing a comfortable refuge, exhibiting an eclectic mix of works by Haegue Yang and Wilson Shieh alongside David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Gilbert and George, reinforcing the strong Japanese and Korean presence this year.

Sculptural highlights included young Korean artist Myeongbeom Kim's striking deer and Paolo Pivi’s shocking pink-feathered polar bear.  The ultimate crowd-pleaser, however, proved to be Japanese artist Shintaro Miyake who, perched on a Sori Yanagi-designed Elephant Stool, treated visitors to a live wall drawing performance.

'Millie's Centre Neon Sign (miniature replica)' was another highlight at Duddell's. Courtesy of M+, West Kowloon Cultural District

ADDRESS

Art Basel Hong Kong 2015 was at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

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The shake-up of the British art scene is finally complete, and the enfants terribles are the new establishment. Not that the original establishment ever really left - they just took a back seat, happy to let the young turks take centre stage. Now the working practices of 120 distinguished members of the British artistic community, from Maggi Hambling through to the Chapman brothers, have opened up their workspaces and working methods for the definitive state of the nation monograph.

Sanctuary is subtitled 'Britain's artists and their Studios,' but it may as well be called a field guide to the habitats of the contemporary artist, so comprehensive is its overview of the working environments of 120 of the country's best-known practitioners.

Here are the lofts, mews, sheds, warehouses and purpose-built studios of the new artistic elite, a diverse range of work spaces that help contemporary chart art's shift towards large-scale productions - the factory-like set-ups of Tony Cragg or Antony Gormley.

There are smaller practitioners on display as well, offering a rich insight into the emerging creative enclaves that have helped re-draw London's socio-economic map in the past few decades.

Each profile is made up of a Q&A that attempts to uncover the artist's relationship to their studio and the wider world beyond it, be it in London's East End or the wilds of Gloucestershire, and the role that space, time and solitude have on their work.

The British Museum holds a remarkable eight million artefacts in its vaults, which artist Grayson Perry has spent the past few months rummaging through for his latest exhibition. The cross-dressing Turner Prize winner persuaded the London museum to let him create a new exhibition by choosing objects from its archives and displaying them alongside his own work, which includes pottery, tapestry and a sculptural centrepiece - a rusted iron coffin in the shape of a ship, titled The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.

Perry, who recently graced Wallpaper* HQ with his presence for a design discussion for his forthcoming Channel 4 programme, likened the experience of curating the exhibition - also called The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman - to being allowed to 'go mad' in the British Museum. He first narrowed down his pick of the museum's collection to around a thousand pieces, selecting work he was already interested in, before moving on to items that he found by chance or association.

The end product is 30 of his own artworks displayed alongside 170 pieces from the museum's stores, ranging from treasures of antiquity to contemporary items. With themes exploring the notions of craftsmanship and sacred journeys - from shamanism, magic and holy relics to motorbikes - the artefacts on show include Polynesian fetishes, Buddhist votive offerings, a prehistoric hand axe and a Hello Kitty hand towel.

'I invite you to view these artefacts by reading them through my lens,' Perry explains. 'I am not a historian, an archaeologist or an ethnographer. I am an artist and this is principally an art exhibition. I have made my choices of objects from the BM collection because of their connections with each other and with my own work. Sometimes the connection is in their function, sometimes in their subject, and often in their form. One thing that connects all my choices is my delight in them.'

ADDRESS

British Museum
Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DG

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