Image: Clarendon Fine Art, Westport
Clarendon Fine Art, part of the DeMontfort Fine Art group, has published "A Year of Discovery", a feature dated 29 September 2026 that profiles nine of the artists who joined its portfolio over the past year. The gallery presents the group as a selection rather than a full list of new signings, and names two further international artists expected to join before the end of the year.
The gallery's accompanying newsletter describes British expressive painter James Kerr as its most recent signing. Kerr paints intuitively in oils, building up impasto and then scraping back and reworking the surface as each composition develops. Clarendon links his colour-led approach to a long engagement with the modernists of the twentieth century.
Several of the newcomers work with unusual supports or processes. Teis Albers starts from flowers he photographs himself and combines digital collage with metallic pigments, charcoal, textured gels and diamond dust, setting his work against the tradition of Dutch floral painting. Stiliana Alexieva, born on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, paints seascapes on aluminium, whose reflective surface alters colour and tone as the light changes. Oli Arshinov assembles images from hundreds of hand-painted cubes mounted on brushed aluminium, so that his pop-culture subjects change as the viewer moves around them.
Landscape runs through much of the group. Magdalena Morey, whose early training was in artistic textiles, layers acrylic, pastel and mixed media in paintings based on the scenery and light of northern Spain. Amelia Humber draws on the British wilderness and on painters such as J.M.W. Turner, working in oil, pastel and graphite. Sam Rudd gathers sketches between rural Cheshire and the North Wales coast before developing semi-abstract landscapes in charcoal, acrylic and oil in the studio.
Two of the artists arrive with established profiles. Kristjana S. Williams builds collages from Victorian engravings, antique maps, animals and botanical imagery; Clarendon cites commissions from Coldplay, Fortnum & Mason, the V&A and the Vatican Library. James Joyce reduces contemporary signs and symbols to spare graphic images. According to the gallery, his work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy, and his Perseverance in the Face of Absurdity featured as the key image for Banksy's Dismaland.
The two artists due to join are Alessandro Casetti, who uses industrial paints and gravity to produce surfaces that crack and fracture as they dry, and Australian painter Brad Robson, who works in oils with blades, squeegees and other tools to fragment and rebuild portraits of familiar public figures. Clarendon has given no more precise timing for their arrival.
