The Director’s Cut: Hampstead 2026

With Affordable Art Fair Hampstead (6–10 May) just around the corner, we asked Fair Director Hugo Barclay to share a few of his most-anticipated highlights from this year’s line-up.

“With thousands of artworks presented by over 100 galleries, choosing was no easy task, but here are a few pieces that have really caught my eye. With eight new galleries joining this edition, alongside returning exhibitors bringing brand new artworks, the Hampstead edition  promises plenty to discover.” – Hugo Barclay, UK Fair Director.

Richard Twose paints figures that feel caught between worlds: mythic in their weight, yet intimate enough to stop you mid-step. His mastery of the non-finito, that Old Master tradition of leaving a work deliberately unresolved, pulls the viewer in as an active participant rather than a passive observer. Something is always just out of reach, and that’s precisely the point.

It’s a practice that has earned him serious recognition: second place in the BP Portrait Award, a presence in the Royal Scottish Academy, and commissions for Oxford colleges and the National Portrait Gallery.

Bethany Holmes brings an instinctive, physically charged approach to abstraction in which colour becomes both subject and architect. She responds not to topography but to atmosphere: shifting light, temperature changes, and seasonal rhythms become catalysts for layered, sensory canvases that function as emotional records rather than depictions.

Eri Kato makes art from the materials most of us throw away: cardboard boxes, envelopes, printed flyers. Rooted in an acute sensitivity to materiality, she cuts, folds, and layers these everyday scraps into abstract compositions that are quietly captivating, where texture and form take centre stage. The results feel almost like puzzles, familiar in their materials yet transformed into something entirely new.

Jim Gladwin, Ceramics Unbound

Jim Gladwin has a deep, almost elemental understanding of clay, working with its weight, temperature, colour and physical limits to create sculpture that feels both ancient and immediate. Rather than following the conventions of traditional craft, he strips his forms back to their essentials, letting the material itself lead the way.