British Art Fair Announces Exhibitors For Autumn 2025 Edition

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Now in its fourth decade, the British Art Fair returns this autumn as both a marketplace and a living archive. At this rare convergence point, Hepworth’s carved forms share space with Hirst’s dot paintings, where Riley’s optical vibrations dialogue with Emin’s neon confessions. This isn’t merely an art fair; it’s a temporal crossroads where Modern British stalwarts and contemporary disruptors occupy the same critical space.

The 2025 edition doubles down on its founding mission: to recalibrate the value of British art beyond the usual Bacon-Freud-Moore triumvirate. Dealers from Austin/Desmond to Messums will showcase underappreciated modernists, such as Ivon Hitchens, alongside YBA provocateurs, creating unexpected genealogies. Look closely and you’ll spot Fedden’s still lifes whispering to Rego’s narrative tableaux, or Auerbach’s impasto finding distant cousins in Albert Irvin’s chromatic explosions.

Two initiatives bookend the timeline: SOLO Contemporary spotlights emerging practitioners at career inflexion points, while Digitalism—last year’s breakout section—expands its interrogation of tech’s role in artmaking. The latter feels particularly urgent as NFTs recede and a more substantive digital practice emerges.

The fair’s origin story reads like classic London art world lore: its inaugural 1988 edition unfolded in a basement beneath the Cumberland Hotel, where a leaking KFC was the backdrop, and Scottish Colourists unexpectedly stole the show. By 1991’s move to the RCA—that incubator of British art’s DNA—the event began to mirror the institution’s contradictions: simultaneously an establishment and an avant-garde.

Those early recession years (remember 17% interest rates?) tested the fair’s mettle. The 1993 edition barely fielded 25 dealers, while leadership upheavals saw original directors replaced by Angela “Bunny” Wynn’s steady hand. That survival instinct now manifests in thoughtful curation—no filler, just dealers who can articulate why a 1970s John Piper watercolour matters as much as a 2024 AI-generated installation.

What sets this fair apart is its refusal to treat Modern and Contemporary as segregated categories. The hanging committees deliberately spark visual conversations across generations: perhaps a Gwen John interior beside a Michael Armitage textile work, or a Hitchens landscape facing a Hurvin Anderson pool scene. These juxtapositions reveal throughlines in British art—that persistent tension between introspection and spectacle, between the pastoral and the urban.

For collectors, it’s a chance to acquire with context. Unlike mega-fairs where provenance gets lost in the bustle, here specialists like Patrick Bourne or Jonathan Clark can unpack a Nicholson relief’s journey from St Ives to Mayfair, or trace how Rego’s feminism reshaped Portuguese-British dialogues.

*British Art Fair 2025 runs [25-28 September] at [Saatchi Gallery Chelsea]. Early bird tickets are available for morning viewings…

Exhibitors List So Far

155A Gallery, London

99 Loop Gallery & Virginia Damsta, SOLO Contemporary