Must Have Investment Pieces & Ones To Watch From Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2023

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair – the largest fair entirely devoted to contemporary print – returns for its eighth edition! Bigger and better than ever before, WCPF brings together an incredible line-up of 1000 original artworks in a unique hybrid exhibition of emerging artists, famous names and specialist galleries.

Explore, discover, and collect the very best in international contemporary original print.

David Shrigley’s drawings, paintings, animations, and neon texts embrace cartoon aesthetics and an absurd, deadpan sensibility. The artist delights in satirising everyday human interactions, filtering the mundane through a sense of childlike wonder and an unguarded sense of humour.

A member of the provocative, irreverent Young British Artist cohort, Gavin Turk honors the legacies of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol throughout his multimedia investigations of authorship, authenticity, and identity. In his paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, and videos, the artist repurposes recognizable forms and motifs from the art historical canon. Turk reconsiders the ideas of the “masterpiece,” the “genius,” and the sanctity of art objects themselves.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1989) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1991). His interdisciplinary practice uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.

Works by David Hockney are included in major museum collections globally including the Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Kunstmuseum, Basel amongst many others. As a major influence on the Pop Art movement, he has recently been the subject of career retrospectives at the Tate Britain, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

British artist and novelist Harland Miller is best known for painting canvases that resemble Penguin book covers. The motif allows him to explore the relationships between words, images, and the process of producing meaning—themes he embraces in his sculptures and mixed-media works, as well.

Katherine Jones makes distinctive images that are inhabited by ordinary objects, spaces and buildings. Often the structures depicted are fragile or vulnerable, covered or transparent. They are a framework the artist uses to begin to question perceptions of safety and danger. These issues are under the surface of her everyday as an artist –mother and an individual in a challenged world environment.

Eliza Hopewell is an artist working across painting, printmaking and furniture. Her work explores the difference between the interior and exterior worlds of women, and endeavours to open up the private, imaginary spaces that women occupy away from the public performance of femininity. Last year Hopewell was selected by Katy Hessell for the Great Women Artists residency 2022 at Palazzo Monti.

David Spiller created art filled with life and energy, compressing a world of influences, ideas and impressions into beautiful screenprints. His work combined the punchy aesthetics of Pop Art with his own brand of expressionism influenced by Dubuffet, Picasso and his first teacher, Frank Auerbach. Simultaneously fun and sincere, his work captures the imagination of adults and children alike.

Amsterdam-born contemporary artist Bobbye Fermie is known for her dreamlike works on paper that explore introspective figures portrayed in imaginary spaces. Solitary, but quietly self-assured, her female protagonists are described by the artist as ‘based on my own characteristics and experiences’ rather than being ‘a direct translation or self-portrait’. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her work is currently held at several collections, including the Morritz-Heyman Collection, The Royal Collection and Soho House.

Liorah Tchiprout’s work explores girlhood, belonging, and the theatrical, underpinned by a rigorous practice of drawing. Her work is informed by a legacy of Yiddish theatre and literature. She builds physical puppet characters to construct her own pantheon from which to draw images. This methodology allows these characters to sit in between the real and the imagined, drawn from a reality that is constructed. Through it she builds a world which recentres the stories of women and girls - a world for them to liaise, interact, and plot in.

Rebecca graduated from Loughborough University of Art and Design, where she studied Fine Art, in 2011. Since then, her practice has focused on drawing and printmaking. Though rendered with precision, the landscapes Rebecca depicts are a composite of figurative elements, discrete natural phenomena, recorded with pencil and photography, cut up, distorted and combined to create an unnatural location, one which speaks as directly to the emotions as it does to the senses.

The origins of Natasha Michaels recent monoprints lie in historical portraits from the renaissance to the 19th century. Exploring challenging and at times up-ending traditional conventions and genres, Michaels’ work is an investigation of her own ambivalence towards the originals. At once subverting and celebrating, she uses her own expressive language to recast and direct the sitters, reimagining them as fictional characters. The subjects often appear uncomfortable or perplexed as Michaels plays with ideas of power, gender and artifice. directing the viewer to consider their status.

Louise Benton uses the visual language of catholicism to tell contemporary stories of sexuality and pleasure. Alongside a practice of painting, stained glass and sculpture, Benton’s prints are imaginings of a divine that speaks to and accepts the contemporary woman, liberating cherubs and heavenly iconography from their censored and repressed history, and placing them in a world where pleasure and freedom is valued more than chastity and control. She holds an MA History of Art from the University of Edinburgh and has completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

Samuel Bassett’s ghostlike paintings depict psychologically layered scenes imbued with pathos. He situates his fractured figures in dark picture planes full of vigorous slashing brushstrokes and vast fields of vivid color, insinuating psychological landscapes that reflect the inner worlds of the artist’s guarded subjects and suggesting the work of Francis Bacon. Bassett draws on his own life and family lore to inform his works, which frequently verge on abstraction. He has exhibited widely within the United Kingdom. In addition to his paintings, Bassett has also produced sculptures and works on paper.

Susie Hamilton’s work focuses on figures in wilderness. This wilderness may be literal (the arctic) or metaphorical (the superstore) but both can be arenas for transformation. Thin veils of acrylic burst boundaries and destroy contours to suggest mutation and deliquescence and show figures as stretched, pulverised, unstable, vulnerable. Such mutation is not just change within the human but beyond it, with figures grotesquely or uncannily turned into humanoid, hybrid things or into blots, cells, messes, silhouettes and, especially, abstract shapes.

Mohammad Barrangi’s work is inspired by his heritage, Iranian mythological stories and contemporary events of social upheaval. His works combine elements of Persian calligraphy, old scientific illustration, storytelling, text, and humour. Using a creative process involving drawing and printing on handmade paper and using traditional calligraphy pens and mark-marking styles, he creates works which are often developed into large-scale murals. Barrangi’s work centres on experiences of travel, journeys and his lived experience with immigration and disability.