London Art Fair 2026: 10 artists to watch
Kicking off the London art fair calendar, as always, this week saw London Art Fair back at Islington’s Business Design Fair, for its 38th year. A welcome awakening from the festive lull, we were thrilled to see so many young and experimental galleries on show, alongside important LAF stalwarts.
Galleries in the Platform section of the fair were the standout for us – and it was great to see them shown right at the very entrance of the venue. Each year, the Platform section at London Art Fair invites an exclusive selection of galleries to present work by well-known, overlooked and emerging artists all aligned to a single distinct theme chosen by a guest curator.This year, it was the challenge of art historian and author Dr Ferren Gipson, who chose to explore the theme of The Unexpected – bringing together artists who challenge conventions in material, process, and form in their work. Whether utilising materials in imaginative ways or incorporating innovative methods, these artists disrupt familiar boundaries to expand what materials can represent and do within their practice.
The exhibition celebrates innovation and surprise, showcasing the ways artists experiment to defy classification, provoke curiosity, and reframe the relationship between material and meaning. What connects the works is not a shared medium, but a shared spirit of reinvention that challenges hierarchies of value, function, and technique. The exhibition invites viewers to engage with how technique and substance can imbue works with further layers of meaning that touch on identity, tradition, and more. Through approaches that are playful, technical, or radical, the artists in The Unexpected reveal the power that material and method have to broaden our understanding of contemporary practice.
Below, we’ve selected ten of our favourite artists from across the fair – some, but not all, are from The Unexpected section.
Laetitzia Campbell
Ed Cross Fine Art
LAETITZIA CAMPBELL, BY THE WINDOW, 2025. Cotton and polyester thread on cotton fabric. 79 × 61.5 cm. Copyright The Artist
#FLODown: One of the very first artists encountered in The Unexpected, Laetitzia Campbell is a British-French artist of Jamaican heritage, now based in London. For four years, she worked in the luxury industry in embroidery before returning to her own art practice, and now works predominantly in textiles, using thread as a form of drawing. Her work is intricate yet free-flowing, with loose threads, like sketch lines, forming part of compositions that hover between figuration and abstraction, suggesting movement, thought, feelings, intuitions, the passage of time, connections. She explores what she calls “second-hand memories”: emotions passed down through objects, stories, and gestures, and the quiet ways we try to hold onto them.
Instagram: Laetitzia Campbell —@laetitziacampbell; Ed Cross Fine Art @edcrossfineart
Lydia Smith
Cramer St Gallery
LYDIA SMITH, Cramer Street Gallery. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns
#FLODown: Lydia Smith’s practice is rooted in automatism, a process that allows intuition to lead and the unconscious to shape each work. Working across sculpture, works on paper and digital media, she begins without fixed ideas, allowing her research, thoughts and experiences to surface intuitively. Working with both historical and contemporary processes to realise her works, through her practice she explores the theme of human connection, drawing from the intertwined histories of ancient beliefs, technological progress, scientific inquiry, and spiritual exploration. She uses the physical and digital landscape to create sculptures, paintings and digital art. Working with clay, she enters a flow state, allowing her concepts to express themselves subconsciously; from this state of openness, she examines the hidden systems that shape who we are, from subconscious conditioning to the codes written in our DNA, questioning where instinct ends and identity begins. A dialogue unfolds between line and form as geometry takes shape across both material and immaterial worlds. Moving between her hands, to the software, and back again, she builds a rhythm between process and thought. The finished works hold a sense of balance and quiet intensity, inviting the viewer to pause and reflect.
Instagram: Lydia Smith — @lydiasmithartist/ Cramer St Gallery — @cramerstgallery
Meitao Qu
TM Lighting with Royal Sculptors
MEITAO QU, TM Lighting with Royal Sculptors. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns
#FLODown: Meitao Qu is a UK-based Chinese artist working across sculpture, installation and digital media. Taking urban landscapes, industrial infrastructure and domestic interiors as sites of inquiry, her practice explores how popular imaginations and dominant ideologies are inscribed through the material and architectural fabric of daily life. Reworking forms drawn from decorative, culinary and botanical art traditions, she is interested in the plasticity of meaning that emerges between objects, their makers and users. Using ready-made models and prefabricated assets, her work assembles fragments of scaled worlds to produce referential encounters with objects and spaces that stage and shape the everyday.
Instagram: Meitao Qu — @mt_qu TM Lighting — @tmlighting
Emily Ponsonby
Gillian Jason Gallery
EMILY PONSONBY, Gillian Jason Gallery. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns.
#FLODown: Emily Ponsonby is primarily known for working with beeswax, a technique which builds upon the Ancient Egyptians’ encaustic process – buffing, binding and scraping pigment into layers of wax. The rawness and malleability of her materials are in harmony with the bodies she depicts amongst the everchanging topography and gnarly shores of the Southwest, where she is based. Raised by a hobbyist beekeeper, Ponsonby started experimenting with beeswax early on, combining it with oil pigment to forge luminous, sculptural surfaces that pulse with tactile energy. Through the inherent materiality of her practice, intimacy, touch and human connection are explored through the medium as well as the message. Richly layered surfaces of beeswax and oil paint reflect an enduring belief in the power of shared moments, and her paintings suggest a world where stories unfold unhurriedly.
Instagram: Emily Ponsonby — @emily.ponsonby; Gillian Jason Gallery — @gillianjasongallery
LUAP
North London Framing
LUAP, North London Framing. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns
#FLODown: You may well be familiar with the Pink Bear made so iconic by British artist LUAP, however this monumental new painting pushes deeper into the more painterly sides of his varied practice. Golden Chips & The Three Bears stages a powerful confrontation between the familiar and the surreal. Three of his Pink Bears crowd a booth in a seaside restaurant, intensely engaged in the ritual of eating fish and chips under a sheet of stark, pale, nostalgic light. The painting is a visual meditation on working-class ritual, shared memory, and the lasting comfort found in simple pleasures. The restaurant is Steels in Cleethorpes, a traditional fish and chip institution that has been a fixture of the seaside resort since the 1940s. For LUAP, it is a deeply personal space: a family landmark tied to birthdays, Christmas celebrations, and one final meal with his Grandad. Crucially, the setting stands in for many such working-class gathering places where warmth and togetherness are built around hot plates and worn tabletops.
Instagram: LUAP — @luap ; North London Framing — @nlfframers
Elen Bezhen
Dorothy Circus
ELEN BEZHEN, Dorothy Circus. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns
#FLODown: Elen Bezhen is a figurative painter exploring the relationship between nature and humanity, with a focus on the feminine image. Born in the North Caucasus, her love for nature began early and deepened through careful observation of landscapes. She later moved to Moscow, earning a classical art education at the Academy of Fine Arts before studying contemporary art at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Deeply influenced by the Northern Renaissance masters, she integrates their techniques into her work, blending tradition with modernity. Her textured, vibrant paintings reflect this fusion, evolving over time into a distinctive style. Now based in Grenoble, France, Bezhencontinues to refine her artistic vision, balancing classical influences with contemporary expression. Her solo show at Dorothy Circus opens next month.
Instagram: Elen Bezhen — @elen.bezhen; Dorothy Circus (Gallery) — @dorothycircus
Alex Russell Flint
Catto Gallery
ALEX RUSSELL FLINT, The Catto Gallery. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns.
#FLODown: Alex Russell Flint is a British artist specialising in representational narrative works in oil and charcoal. His painted females – posing lyrically or almost in meditation – have a stillness, but one which is charged with an undercurrent of drama that strikes a rare and beguiling balance between the classical and the contemporary. The great-grandson of artist Sir William Russell Flint, also a great depicter of mysterious female beauties, Alex happily admits a shared sensibility with his forebear, whose work surrounded him as a youngster: “I enjoy his love of the exotic and the erotic and paintings which aren't ashamed to be beautiful or playful.”
Instagram: Alex Russell Flint — @alexrussellflint; Catto Gallery — @cattogallery
Zeng Chuanxing
Tanya Baxter Contemporary
ZENG CHUANCHING, Tanya Baxter Contemporary. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns
#FLODown: Zeng Chuanxing is a contemporary Chinese painter known for his portraits of ethnic minority women. Known as the Paper Bride series, Zeng’s realist portraits express a melancholic delicacy in his sitters. The artist’s work serves as a commentary on the post-Mao, post-Cultural Revolution era, as well as on the Western influence on Chinese culture. Born in 1974 in Longchang County, China, Zeng’s work is influenced by the environment in which he was brought up, as well as by the changing cultural dynamic of China. Zeng is especially fond of classical realism; a means through which he believes can thoroughly and delicately express his feelings. He stresses careful depiction of his characters’ eyes and hands because he feels that eyes and hands vividly and truly reflect a human being’s soul. Characters in his works are often quiet and melancholy, a feeling projected by the brown or greyish blue backgrounds.
Instagram: Tanya Baxter Contemporary — @tanya_baxter_contemporary
Juan Escudero
Pigment Gallery
JUAN ESCUDERO, Pigment Gallery. London Art Fair 2026. Image courtesy of Tani Burns
#FLODown: A graduate in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, specialising in painting, Escudero has been fully dedicated to printmaking since 2017. His technique is as complex as it is ambitious. In his own terms, his condition for drawing is “that all marks made are visible and that no corrections are made,” working with a system in which “a first line prefigures the background line, and any irregularity is transmitted to the next one.” This process parallels natural processes, so his drawings connect with familiar patterns and shapes, such as surfaces, fabrics, fluids, topography, or waves, among others. Escudero defines the basic idea of his drawing not as the representation of a concrete image, but as the activation of a process. A process that, in the artist’s words, “is similar to the automatic drawings we make unconsciously when we talk on the phone, a musical improvisation, or automatic writing: a clear and immediate flow, without corrections.” In this way, his work becomes a visual experience that invites the viewer to connect with these natural patterns and reflect on the imperfection and fluidity of the creative process.
Instagram: Juan Escudero — @juanescudero00; Pigment Gallery — @pigmentgallery
Ikuko Iwamoto
Cavaliero Finn
IKUKO IWAMOTO, Cavaliero Finn. London Art Fair 2026. Image credit Tani Burns.
#FLODown: In a new series of works titled, "Ghosts from the Sea," IkukoIwamoto explores environmental concerns. Growing up near the sea in Japan, on a diet of mainly pescatarian food, these sculptures arose from Ikuko’s concerns about the irreparable environmental damage caused by modern fishing practices.“These fish are the ghosts of the sea representing those destroyed by fishing practices such as bottom trawling, those species captured by mistake and disgarded and those killed by plastic waste,” she says. Ikuko's imagination is met by great skill in this poignant work, which also harks back to her roots in Japan and her meticulous training under ceramic master Asuka Tsuboi, one of the pioneering women potters to emerge in Japan in the 1970s. Wit, sensitivity, patience and incredible craftsmanship all come together in these intriguing, ghostly marine sculptures.
Instagram: Ikuko Iwamoto — @ikukoikik; Cavaliero Finn — @cavalierofinn
London Art Fair runs until Sunday 25 January 2026 at the Business Design Centre, Islington, N1 0QH. For more information head to londonartfair.co.uk
Words by Tani Burns
