PAST EVENTS
24 April 2024
Making sales | The Shifting Landscape

Alexandra Hochgürtel & Paula Parole
The Filthy Fox Auction Club is an artist-run auction ‘club’ based in London, run by two friends and art passionates: Paula Parole and Alexandra Hochgürtel. Being part of the eco-system of art college, it has become crystal clear to them how difficult the start of an artistic career within the inaccessible art market can be. The need for more opportunities post-graduation and the tough transition into the “real” art market is what triggered the creation of the Filthy Fox Auction Club. Through their out-of-the-ordinary auction events in spaces around London, they wish to introduce and support a selection of emerging artists - right out of London’s art colleges. Their auctions are always broadcast on Instagram-Live, which offers people from all over the world to bid from anywhere in the comment section.
Alexandra Hochgürtel
Alexandra’s degree in design management and graphic communication design (MA, CSM), coupled with her experience working on creative briefs spanning from university to workplace context, has given her a deep understanding of the creative industries. Her graduate project proposed a value exchange between artists and art enthusiasts outside of the existing gallery setting.
Paula Parole
As a recent Fine Art graduate (MFA, CSM), Paula is aware of the struggle her peers face upon graduation. Apart from her artistic practice in painting and sculpture, she has acquired year-long work experience from leading art institutions, such as the Boros Collection Berlin, Grisebach Auction House and Eguiguren Gallery (TEFAF), developing a commercial understanding of the sector.
07 February 2024
Online Visibility... Without Overwhelming

Mollie Balshaw
Mollie Balshaw is a queer visual artist and producer based in the North West. They create paintings in the expanded field, which is a fancy way of saying they make paintings using non-traditional materials and methods; like chucking a disco ball in a bucket of emulsion or making a portrait with a plastic garden chair. This disinterest in tradition and use of unconventional processes and humour is a signifier for queerness in a cis-het dominated medium... and it’s also really fun.
They are co-director of arts organisation Short Supply, member of a-n The Artist Information Company’s Artists Council, member of Manchester City Council’s Cultural Consortium and trustee of Islington Mill Foundation in Salford. They understand the challenges artists from queer and lower socio economic backgrounds face and network artists to advocate for each other, as well as maintaining their own practice.
01 March 2023
The Legal + Financial Maze of Being an Artist

Kimberley Ahmet
Kimberley is the Senior Manager at the Artists' Collecting Society (ACS). Before joining ACS, Kimberley was based at the Museum of London where she worked on the Curatorial team. Kimberley read English Literature at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2007 and completed an MA in Museum Studies at the University of London.
ACS is the premium collecting society for the administration of the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR). ARR is a royalty generated on the sale price of original works of art that are sold on the secondary market and it applies to all artists who are UK or EEA citizens. ACS represents over 1,000 artists and artists’ estates including painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, and artists working in glass and ceramics.
ACS is proud to fund bursaries and residencies for art students at leading institutions, whilst also sponsoring a number of art prizes and charities.

John Martin
John Martin is the gallery director of John Martin Gallery which he opened in 1992. He was the founder and creative director of Cromwell Place in South Kensington (2014-19) and co-founder and fair director of Art Dubai (2007-9). He is a Board Director of Cromwell Place and the Mayfair Art Weekend and works as an External Advisor for Bain & Co.
02 Nov 2022
Studio Life, Exhibitions + Collaborations

Emmanuel Unaji
Emmanuel Unaji (b.1994) a British-born Nigerian multidisciplinary artist & co-founder of award-winning design company, Unaji&Co. His signature portraits, combining collage, drawing and painting, have gained widespread recognition in the creative industries and have been featured in household institutions including The Royal Exchange, Tate Britain, Adidas Flagship Store, London Fashion Week and The Freemasons Hall. Coined as ‘new talent to watch’ by several publications and brands such as Forbes, British GQ and Adidas, Unaji explores the socio-economic movement of the African body, sculpting his own space, at the intersection of fashion, luxury, street and fine art.
Emmanuel studied fashion design and completed a degree in BA (Hons) Fine Art at Kingston University in London where he resides. With adept experience in High Fashion, he has modelled for prestigious brands such as Gucci, Ozwald Boateng, British GQ and Adidas.
Artist Residencies: The Hari Hotel, 2021
Represented by Acid Gallery, Lille

Maggie Matić
Dr Maggie Matić is a curator, writer and researcher with a specialism in contemporary feminist and queer visual culture. Maggie is currently Curator (Studios & Residencies) at Studio Voltaire, and has previously worked at Tate, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology), The University of Liverpool and The Royal Standard.
At Studio Voltaire, Maggie oversees all aspects of the studio and residency programmes, including the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award, the Syllabus programme, Open House and the rolling artist residency and professional development programme.
Studio Voltaire has always held a strong commitment to supporting under-represented artists and emerging practices, allowing the organisation to offer an alternative and agenda–setting view of contemporary practice. It has grown from a local artist–run collective to an internationally celebrated arts organisation. As a direct result of
Studio Voltaire programmes, many participating artists have gone on to be awarded or nominated for prizes including the Turner, Carnegie and Wolfgang Hahn Prizes and MacArthur Genius Fellowship, as well as participating in Venice Biennale, Skulptur Projekte Munster, Whitney Biennial and documenta.
04 May 2022
Building + Retaining a Career After Art School

Gavin Turk
Gavin achieved instant notoriety in 1991 when the Royal College of Art refused him a degree on the basis that his final show, ‘Cave’, consisted of a whitewashed studio space containing only a blue heritage plaque commemorating his presence: ‘Gavin Turk worked here 1989-91’.
A British born, international artist, Gavin became a leading YBA who pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art. His installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Gavin’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp.
Gavin was spotted by Charles Saatchi and was included in several YBA exhibitions. His work has since been collected and exhibited by many major museums and galleries around the world. He has completed several public sculptures, including L’Âge d’Or (2016), sited on the south corner of the Press Centre building in London’s Olympic Park and Nail, a 12-meter sculpture at One New Change, next to St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Paul Benney
Paul has worked as an artist and musician in both the US and the UK and is represented in public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Australia, The National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Collection, The Eli Broad Foundation, plus numerous other public and corporate collections.
Paul’s work has been selected for eight BP Portrait Awards exhibitions, twice winning the public choice award and has been shortlisted on two occasions. In 2020 he was one of seven leading artists commissioned by the Prince of Wales to paint portraits of seven Holocaust survivors (Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust, a documentary on BBC 2).
A member of the Neo-Expressionist group of the early 80’s in New York’s East Village, Paul became known for his depictions of stygian themes and dark nights of the soul. One of the UK’s leading portrait artists, Paul has painted many prominent cultural and political figures.
Photo by Dominick Soar