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What’s Next for British Art?

The country's canon has always been narrower than the work actually being made, particularly by women and regional artists overlooked in their time. Reconsidering them is a necessary correction.

Ask someone to name the great figures of British art and the same names tend to recur: Hockney, Hepworth, Lowry, Bacon. Their importance is beyond dispute. Yet those names have come to stand for a much broader, more varied and more complicated story.

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British art has never been confined to a handful of household names, or even to the familiar hierarchy of modern masters and contemporary stars. It has been shaped by painters, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers and, increasingly, artists working with new technologies. The question now is not simply who might become the next Hockney, but whether our idea of British art is expansive enough to recognize where the most interesting work is already being made.

That question matters because art history, despite appearances, is never settled. The Contemporary Art Society, founded in 1910, notes that it has donated more than 10,500 works by 3,000 artists to UK museums; its recent yearbook recorded 130 works by 42 artists placed in 31 museum collections in 2025–26, with a value of £1.2 million. Evidently, public collections are still being built, corrected, and re-read.

One of the most encouraging developments of recent years has been a growing willingness to revisit artists and movements that fell outside the established canon. Museum exhibitions, new scholarship, and the work of specialist dealers are bringing renewed attention to artists whose reputations have not always matched the quality or significance of their work.

At British Art Fair, that breadth will be visible in the same rooms. The line up spans 20th-century figures including Frank Auerbach, Barbara Hepworth, L.S. Lowry,........

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