2025 Art Icon Auction

Phillips | 26 February – 5 March 2025  

Bidding opens today for the 2025 Art Icon Auction, with a stellar lineup of works from leading contemporary artists in support of Whitechapel Gallery’s Exhibition and Participation Programmes.

Whitechapel Gallery is delighted to announce the donation of 20 exceptional artworks for auction by artists Andrew Pierre Hart (b. UK), Gideon Rubin (b.1973, Israel), Ali Kazim (b.1979, Pakistan), Daisy Dodd-Noble (b.1989, UK), Taylor Simmons (b.1990, USA), Wynnie Mynerva (b.1992, Peru), Ania Hobson (b.1990, UK), Danny Fox (b.1986, UK), Julie Curtiss (b.1982, France), Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b.1992, UK), Michele Fletcher (b. 1963, Canada), Rose Nestler (b.1983, USA), Studio Lenca (b.1986, El Salvador), Hettie Inniss (b.1999, UK), Tiona Nekkia McClodden (b.1981, USA), Victoria Cantons (b.1969, UK), Peter Kennard (b.1949, UK), Christopher Page (b.1984, UK), Michael Armitage (b.1984, Kenya), Sang Woo Kim (b.1994, South Korea).  With two generous donations for private sale from Theodore Ereira-Guyer (b.1990, UK) and Sholto Blissett (b.1996, UK).

The online charity auction will be hosted by Phillips on www.phillips.com, with bidding open from 12pm GMT on 26 February 2025, through to 2pm GMT on 5 March 2025.

There will be a display of auction artworks at Whitechapel Gallery from 26 February to 5 March 2025.

All donated artworks will be sold in support of Whitechapel Gallery’s Exhibition and Participation Programmes, with a particular focus on nurturing artists, amplifying diverse voices and creating opportunities for audiences of all backgrounds to engage with bold and inspiring art.

Art Icon is an annual initiative that celebrates the work of an artist who has made a profound contribution to the artistic landscape and influenced a generation of artists. The 2025 Art Icon Award will be presented to the award winning Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo by the eminent lawyer and human rights champion, Baroness Helena Kennedy at a special gala celebration held at Whitechapel Gallery on 3 March 2025. The evening will feature a special reading by award-winning British-Turkish novelist and essayist Elif Shafak, followed by a performance by singer-songwriter Stephanie Santiago.

Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Colombia) is a leading voice in contemporary art, known for her arresting sculptural and installation works that engage with themes of political violence, trauma and loss. Drawing on her own experience of Colombia’s turbulent political history while also reflecting broader global concerns, Salcedo creates monumental yet intimate spaces for individual and collective mourning, giving form to the invisibility of peoples marginalised by war, migration and poverty. Her practice is informed by a rigorous research process, which often involves spending time with remote rural communities and draws on a range of resources including philosophy, literature and poetry. She describes her art as a “topology of mourning”, importantly bearing witness to lives erased or diminished by political agendas.

The Art Icon 2025 Committee comprised Jeremy Achkar, Dorota Audemars, Erin Bell, Charlotte Gibbs, Beth Greenacre, Dame Vivian Hunt DBE & Nicholas Basden, Susannah Hyman and Maria Sukkar.

Cheyenne Westphal, Global Chairwoman, Phillips, said “Phillips is honoured to support Whitechapel Gallery for the twelfth annual Art Icon Gala, which this year celebrates the extraordinary achievements of Doris Salcedo and the profound impact of her work on the artistic landscape. We are thrilled to serve as the auction partner for the Art Icon online auction on Phillips.com. Proceeds from the auction will directly benefit Whitechapel Gallery’s Exhibitions and pioneering Participation Programmes. Through our ongoing partnership with Whitechapel Gallery and our broader global Arts Partnerships programme, Phillips remains dedicated to fostering, supporting and championing contemporary art and culture on both local and international stages.”

List of auctioned artworks:

• Sang Woo Kim interrogates identity, cultural duality and the gaze, drawing deeply from his experience as a first-generation immigrant. Themes of perception, self-construction and the impact of societal frameworks are central to his art, as seen in Moment of 014 (2024).
• Ali Kazim creates layered watercolour drawings that often depict solitary figures and desolate landscapes using techniques inspired by miniature painting. Untitled (Bird Hunter Series) (2024) depicts hunters from the Indus Delta who rely on migratory birds for their livelihood.
• Danny Fox creates vibrant, expressive paintings that fuse raw emotion with a deep connection to his coastal upbring. Rider with Scarf (2023) features one of Fox’s recurring motifs—a majestic horse—which symbolises humanity’s desire to conquer and control.
• Michele Fletcher’s vibrant, process-driven painting Crash (2024) explores humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world.
• Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s Four Virtues (2023) draws on his Yoruba heritage and West African aesthetics exploring themes of identity, mythology, and cultural hybridity.
• Hettie Inniss explores the fluidity of memory and identity through her sensory painting practice. My Lodestar (2025) embraces ambiguity, layering figuration and abstraction to reflect the instability of memory and the freedom it holds.
• Wynnie Mynerva’s Untitled (Watercolour II) (2024) references historical and mythological iconography while subverting Western Old Master traditions. Mynerva both honours and critiques their classical art education, finding new ways to visualise the complexities of identity and desire.
• Rose Nestler, Memento Mori II (2023) presents a bouquet of calla lilies and fried eggs, meticulously crafted from leather and fabric. The calla lilies, with their vibrant yellow stamens, evoke themes of life, death and sexuality, while the fried eggs introduce the absurd and abject.
• Daisy Dodd-Noble’s vibrant works reimagine canonical landscape painting with a playful, cartoonish sensibility. Forest Study, Worlingham (2024) reflects on the symbiotic relationships within ecosystems, drawing attention to the beauty and fragility of biodiversity.
• Ania Hobson’s vibrant oil painting, She Brought Me to Myself (2025) reimagines portraiture through thick impasto, exaggerated features and a dynamic composition.
• Michael Armitage blends historical narratives, imagery from popular media and personal recollections to explore themes of identity, displacement and cultural heritage. In Dream and Refuge (2020), Armitage portrays a sleeping woman wrapped in a patterned cloth, celebrating her individuality and rich inner world.
• Victoria Cantons probes the human condition, exploring the psychological and emotional boundaries that shape our relationships with ourselves and others. Untitled (The End of Longing), a vivid rendering of lemons, embodies sensuousness, transience and the passage of time.
• Horse Chestnut (2023) exemplifies Julie Curtiss’s exploration of texture and detail. Known for her meticulous figurative paintings and gouache works, Curtiss juxtaposes the mundane with the uncanny, revealing the grotesque and dreamlike undertones of human behaviour.
• Andrew Pierre Hart’s He So Blue (2024) combines Hart’s signature geometric patterns with art-historical influences, engaging with the nighttime cultures and rhythms of Whitechapel.
• Since the late 1960s, Peter Kennard has created politically charged works that confront economic inequality, war, climate change, and social injustice. His work often critiques humanity’s proximity to catastrophe, as epitomised in Untitled: Halting the Doomsday Clock (1988).
• Gideon Rubin’s enigmatic painting, White Collar (2025), explores identity, history and the inheritance of trauma through faceless yet evocative figures. Drawing on various sources, including cinema, pop culture periodicals and art history, Rubin investigates the mythologies of the recent past.
• Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s 2.1 [Manilla Study] (2025), is an object that the artist is using to study the relationship between the economic history of dormant currency as it relates to power and the concept of disintegration.
• Christopher Page explores the boundaries between light, shadow and reflection, creating paintings that hover between illusion and abstraction. His trompe l’oeil works— such as Imago (2024)—transform spaces into uncanny environments where the virtual and physical collide.
• Studio Lenca creates vibrant works that challenge dominant narratives about identity, migration and belonging. Cadena (Chain) (2025) features sharply dressed figures in colourful outfits and hats, navigating borders—both physical and symbolic—shaped by colonisation, war, and displacement.
• Taylor Simmons’s Show Some Leg (2022) captures a hazy, fluorescent snapshot of everyday life, seamlessly blending figuration and abstraction into layered, dynamic compositions. Known for his neon palette and innovative use of acrylic, oil, airbrush and wax, Simmons creates fragmented narratives inspired by music, viral videos and found photographs.

Works for private sale

• Theodore Ereira-Guyer merges classical art historical themes with experimental techniques that defy categorisation. His works occupy a liminal space between painting, printmaking, fresco and bas-relief, created through a labour-intensive process.
• Sholto Blissett creates meticulously detailed imaginary landscapes that merge topographical, riverine, and architectural forms. To See the Wood For The Trees III (2024) draws inspiration from surrealism, romanticism, and Renaissance painting traditions like capriccio and veduta.

Press Information   

For more information, interviews and images, contact:

Hannah Vitos, Rees & Co

E hannah@reesandco.com

Will Ferreira Dyke, Whitechapel Gallery

E willferreiradyke@whitechapelgallery.org

Notes for Editors

 About Whitechapel Gallery:

Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 with the aim to bring great art to the people of East London. From the outset, the Gallery exemplified a bold programme of exhibitions and educational activities, driven by the desire to enrich the cultural offer for local communities and provide new opportunities for extraordinary artists from across the globe to showcase their works to UK audiences – often for the first time.

From ground-breaking solo shows from artists as diverse as Barbara Hepworth (1954), Jackson Pollock (1958), Helio Oiticica (1969), Gilbert & George (1971), Eva Hesse (1979), Frida Kahlo (1982), Sonia Boyce DBE RA (1988), Sophie Calle (2010), Zarina Bhimji (2012), Emily Jacir (2015), William Kentridge (2016), Theaster Gates (2021), Nicole Eisenman (2023), Zineb Sedira (2024), Gavin Jantjes (2024), Peter Kennard (2024), Lygia Clark (2024), Sonia Boyce (2024), Donald Rodney (2025) to thought-provoking group and thematic exhibitions that reflect key artistic and cultural concerns, the Gallery’s focus on bringing artists, ideas, and audiences together, remains as important today as it did over a century ago and has helped to cement the East End, as one of the world’s most exciting and diverse cultural quarters.

We are proud to be a Gallery that is locally embedded and globally connected. Its vision, under the current Directorship of Gilane Tawadros, is to ensure Whitechapel Gallery claims a distinctive and radical position in the social and cultural landscape, building on its pioneering history, while translating and animating it for our time.

About Art Icon:

The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award was established in 2014 and celebrates the work of an artist who has made a profound contribution to the artistic landscape and influenced a generation of artists. Previous recipients of the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award are Sir Howard Hodgkin CH CBE (2014), Richard Long RA (2015) Joan Jonas (2016), Peter Doig (2017), Mona Hatoum (2018), Rachel Whiteread DBE (2019), Francis Alÿs (2020), Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (2021), Tracey Emin DBE RA (2022), Jenny Holzer (2023) and Isaac Julien KBE RA (2024).

Art Icon Gala Ticket Enquiries: articonaward@whitechapelgallery.org