Must Have Investment Pieces From Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2022

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the UK’s largest fair entirely devoted to contemporary prints, returns for its seventh 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.

We have created a buying guide for investment pieces available at this year’s Fair. Representing independent artists directly within a curated exhibition gives emerging creatives a spotlight to be discovered, exhibited alongside some of the most prominent international printmakers & specialist dealers today.

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

Grayson Perry is best known for his ceramics, which draw on both the aesthetics of classical pottery and on contemporary iconography. He often references his feminine alter ego “Claire,” who has appeared throughout the rest of his extensive oeuvre as well—Perry also makes textiles, sculptures, and installations, and he has written graphic novels and spearheaded a broadcast television program. Some of Perry’s major themes include the roles of gender, class, taste, and religion in contemporary life, particularly in the United Kingdom. Perry studied at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now the University of Portsmouth) and quickly became ingrained in Britain’s contemporary art scene. He has exhibited in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, and beyond. He won the Turner Prize in 2003.

Damien Hirst, a poster boy for the Young British Artists who rose to prominence in late 1980s London, is one of the most notorious artists of his generation. He has pushed the limits of fine art and good taste with sculptures that comprise dead animals submerged in formaldehyde; innumerable spot paintings that appear mass-produced and can sell for millions of dollars; and the exuberantly tacky For the Love of God (2007), a human skull studded with 8,601 diamonds. Through his installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, Hirst explores themes including religion, mortality, and desire. Since 1988, when the artist developed and curated “Freeze,” a groundbreaking exhibition of his work and that of his Goldsmiths College peers, he has been the subject of major shows at Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Michael Craig-Martin helped pioneer British Conceptual art in the late 20th century. His early work was influenced by Minimalist and Dada tropes. Throughout his career, the artist has made sculptural ready-mades in the vein of Marcel Duchamp and painted close-up depictions of everyday objects in vibrant colour palettes; the connection between object, image, and language has been a pervasive concern.His work belongs in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art and has sold for six figures on the secondary market.

British artist Tom Hammick has described landscape in his work as a metaphor to explore an “imaginary and mythological dreamscape.” Drawing from a wide range of sources, from Japanese woodblock prints to Northern European Romantic painting and contemporary cinema, Hammick’s depictions of isolated human dwellings grounded in uncanny dream-like settings summon the uneasy atmosphere of a psychologically-charged thriller, or a dystopian suburban nightmare.

Birds of Passage grew out of the COVID 19 lockdowns in London in 2019. In response to his memories of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures viewed in the Hepworth gardens in St Ives, Narielwalla created a series of works on the pages of a 1906 tailoring guide by Madame G. Shefer. Entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors, the work referenced Narielwalla’s own creative process and his previous works that utilised found or discarded materials relating to tailoring and pattern cutting. The size of the patterns, that could be scaled up to human body size, contrasted with, but also echoed, the forms of Hepworth’s sculptures and her insistence of the relation between her sculptures and the human form.

Henry Hussey’s multi-disciplinary practice explores identity through a broad range of media including textiles, film, glass, ceramics, drawing and printmaking. Often intensely emotive and raw, Henry’s work, in his words, is ‘about taking unconscious thoughts and giving them permanence’. This is one of a series of new oil-based monotypes made by Henry in advance of a trip to Pilchuck Glass School, Washington, USA. In Henry's words, these new works encapsulate 'moments of expression'.

Henry studied Textiles at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. His work has been exhibited in London, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and New York and is held in collections worldwide. He has recently undertaken two artistic residencies in Italy at La Vallonea, Tuscany and Palazzo Monti, Milan. He is represented by Anima Mundi Gallery, St. Ives, Cornwall, who have regularly exhibited his work.

Sammi Lynch creates works doused in earthy pastel smudges and silky-smooth textures, with the purpose of summoning a sense of place and memory inspired by internal and external landscapes. With oil paint or pastels, the London-based artist creates portals to vibrant, lyrical, moody places.

Liorah Tchiprout’s work explores girlhood, belonging, and the theatrical. 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.

Marina Abramović is perhaps the most famous performance artist working today. Employing duration, pain, danger, exhaustion, and viewer participation, she works at extremes as she complicates the relationship between art and audience. Abramović exhibited at Documenta in 1977, 1982, and 1992 and at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1997, when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist.

Jake Garfield explores the relationship between image and reality through printmaking.

Mirrors, masks and pictures-within-pictures are recurring motifs in a body of work that blurs the distinction between the world of the artist, the world of an image and meta-worlds within an image. He has an MA in Printmaking from The Royal College of Art, a post-graduate diploma from The Royal Drawing School and a BA in Fine Art Painting from Brighton University. Prizes include the Printmaker’s Council Award (2016), The Durham Wharf Award (2015) and the Royal Drawing School Printmakers Prize (2013). Jake’s work lives in public and private collections, including The Royal Collection and The British Museum.

Minho Kwon’s spectacularly detailed drawings are a result of a combination of factors; the regimented structure that surrounded him whilst growing up in Seoul; his exposure to architecture at an early age and his interest in the economic history of Korea. The result is all encompassing; intricate drawings filled with political debate, questions of modernism and, most fundamentally, an in depth analysis of Korean culture.

Eleanor completed her masters in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2019 where she was awarded the Slaughterhaus Print Prize and the ACS Studio Prize. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, in New York, Miami and Amsterdam. Eleanor was the winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award in 2017, culminating in a solo exhibition at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery.

Working together with his older brother, Dinos Chapman, Young British Artist Jake Chapman has been producing installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper since the early 1990s that appall, anger, seduce, and thrill—often simultaneously. An iconoclast to his core, Chapman describes himself as a collection of “traitorous little traits that add up to make the big deplorable trait that is me, me, me.” Such tongue-in-cheek humour underpins all of his work, through which he confronts the horrors and excesses of history, culture, politics, and religion with an unforgiving aesthetic.

Storytelling, human emotion and a gentle sense of humour run through Wuon-Gean’s Ho’s distinctive limited edition prints. Inspired by the distorted view of fish-eye lens photography and the shifting perspective of Chinese scrolls, her imagery features characters often pictured at night-time, engrossed in the task at hand whether it be bathing, cutting their own hair or gazing, lost in thought, at a starlit sky. Wuon-Gean was born in Oxford and graduated with a BA in History of Art from Cambridge University, before taking up a Japanese Government Scholarship in 1998 to study woodblock printmaking in Japan. She later studied for an MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, graduating with a distinction in 2016, and then was etching fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She has exhibited her prints widely in Europe and has been awarded several prizes including the British Institution Award given at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 2014.