Clive Martin uncovers the world of David Yarrow… Please sir, does he want more?

There is an apartment I sometimes walk past, on the ground floor of a red brick mansion block, nestled between Gloucester Road and the southern gate of Kensington Gardens, right opposite the Zambian embassy. It’s a part of town where the British gentry meets global finance, where packs of pampered Pomeranians fight for paving space with hedge fund cowboys in Lululemon compression socks.

In the living room of this apartment, there is a picture on the wall. It isn’t a Scully or a Kiefer or an early Picasso sketch – which is what you might expect around here – but a huge, wall-plastering print of a proud lioness in glossy monochrome. I often stop to admire it on tip-toes, trying to glimpse it above the wrought iron railings. It has an aura which both pulls you in and keeps you at bay. “Gawp all you want, but you’re never coming in,” it seems to say.

The artist behind this image is David Yarrow, the multi-millionaire Scottish photographer, conservationist, ex-hedge fund manager and one-time paramour of Liz Hurley. Yarrow is someone I’ve been fascinated with for some time. His work – which combines fine art photography with wildlife, landscape and celebrity portraiture – seems to chime with the super-rich like few other photographers. Yarrow, the scion of a Glasgow shipbuilding empire, has jokingly referred to himself as the most ‘wall-centric’ artist ever, and while he doesn’t quite command Rothko money, he regularly sells prints in the hundreds of thousands, with his shoot budgets running similarly high.

Yarrow’s vision is gauche, ostentatious, tacky and seemingly unphased by high art legitimacy. His collectors are not the Arnaults, Pinaults or Abramovichs of this world, but footballers, Chinese investment funds, Gordon Ramsay and Formula 1 boss Eddie Jordan. Like fellow ex-stockbroker Jeff Koons, he is an artist with a sharp understanding of the market, but unlike Koons – whose Wall Street experience is now just a bit of on-brand lore – Yarrow dabbled in finance until very recently, running the ‘celebrity hedge fund’ Clareville Capital side-by-side with his art career.

So, when his new exhibition, ‘Storytelling’, came to Mayfair’s Maddox Gallery last week, I felt compelled to visit – that Kensington lioness drawing me in ever closer.

Walking into Maddox on a chapping Monday morning, it’s hard not to feel conspicuous. Within seconds of my arrival, a blonde lady in a floral dress comes over and tries to assess my intent, financially ‘G-checking’ me on the door. Granted, I am wearing jogging bottoms in a gallery, but I imagine a lot of Yarrow’s customers do. I tell her I’m just here to see the work, which she half accepts. “If there’s anything you need, just let me know”, she replies in a tone of suspicious autopilot. I have half a mind to blag my way into a private tour, but I’m suddenly distracted by the arrival of Jay Rutland, another ex-financier, now creative director of Maddox but mostly famous for being the husband of Tamara Ecclestone. With his coiffured beard and patent leather man bag, Rutland doesn’t look like a typical curator. He appears more like a football agent, or commodities trader, which he was until the Financial Services Authority banned him from operating due to ‘market abuse’ back in 2012.

While he and the gallery manager quietly glare at me, I decide to make a hasty tour around the gallery before anyone asks to see my bank statements. The exhibition text speaks grandly of Yarrow, describing him as a “master of storytelling on a grand scale” and the works as “dramatic and transportative.” The show – which actually appears to be more of a retrospective with three new images tacked on – is mostly made up of the classic Yarrow style; high-definition, black-and-white images of wolves, elephants and lions very much like the one I walk past in Kensington. But it is the new work that truly astounds me.

Immediately, I am drawn to an image of Cara Delevingne, cast here in the role of Oliver Twist. On a set constructed at Chatham Docks, Delevinge’s expressive face pleads for more porridge, while a chorus line of child models with Hollywood grime on their faces stare at the camera forlornly – the slightly jarring notion of an aristocratic supermodel playing Victorian workhouse orphan entirely unmentioned in the wall text. Adjacent to this, Delevingne makes another appearance, now in full Peaky Blinders regalia, cockily propped next to David Gandy in a pose that recalls a sixth-form production of Bonnie & Clyde. Yarrow describes these as “a love letter to the London of yesteryear” – neglecting the fact that Peaky Blinders was mostly set in Birmingham.

Although Maddox is no stranger to dreadful late-Banksys and phoned-in Hirsts, it still feels genuinely quite astonishing that these pictures are in a Mayfair Gallery, rather than a canvas print stall in Camden Market, or the back end of some DeviantArt forum. The exhibition notes seem keen to present Yarrow as a pure photographer and master of his craft, but these images are so airbrushed and crushed, their set-ups so strange and arbitrary, that they look almost A.I.

“Create me a picture of Cara Delevingne as Oliver Twist” sounds like something you might try on a wet Wednesday afternoon with a free DALL.E trial, but Yarrow is doing this for real, and making vast returns in the process.

On another wall, Yarrow has envisioned Manchester City’s Erling Haaland as a Viking warrior, rising out of the sea, broadsword and shield in hand. With his Norwegian background, ruthlessness in front of goal and shoulder-length blonde locks, Haaland has inevitably been compared to a Viking by football fans, and here Yarrow has played to this cliche in a sickly digitised grey colour palette. To someone who spends too much time on ‘Football Twitter’, it resembles the kind of Photoshop job that excitable 14-year-olds make of their favourite players, but the clunkiness of this comparison doesn’t seem to bother Yarrow one bit. “I can’t think of a better person to dress like a Viking, it suits him perfectly”, he told The Times.

 

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If that wasn’t literal enough, there is a shot of the New York Stock Exchange Building with, you’ve guessed it, a wolf in front of it. This image seems to reflect Yarrow’s two great loves: finance and wildlife, and is described as “personal” by Maddox. The new work also includes Yarrow’s interpretation of the Barbie phenomenon, where a poodle and a pink-clad model ride down Sunset Boulevard in a convertible, and for some reason, a picture of Bill Nighy walking through sleet-covered 1930s NYC while meat porters and men in hombergs loiter behind him. Yarrow doesn’t elaborate as to why Nighy is in modern dress while everyone else is in period, instead focusing on how much he enjoys Love Actually. There is not a whole lot of concept in Yarrowland, which, I will say, feels quite refreshing in a time of tote bag-busting exhibition guides full of nods to ‘othered experiences’ and ‘imagined spaces’.

There is also a strangely alluring quality to his wildlife work. Yarrow is a great animal lover, raising millions for conservation charities, and seemingly spending much of his life chasing great beasts across the Serengeti and Siberian forests. Yet unlike most National Geographic photographers, who strive for realism and fidelity, Yarrow depicts his animals in an icy, distant, almost mystical fashion. Intentionally or not, they remind me of the pseudo-new-age wolf T-shirts worn by Midwestern families and 2008-era Ed Banger hipsters. Change the text around a bit, and it could almost be ironic post-internet art.

Despite his pretensions about being a true photographer of the old school, Yarrow’s work feels really quite contemporary and very ‘online’. Unlike McCullin or Elgort, his aesthetic seems to slot perfectly into the arenas of modern capitalism; Emirates airport lounges, Cheshire McMansions, supercar dealerships and penthouse wagyu joints. His work is (openly) precision-designed to decorate vast and expensive real estate; there are easy-to-decipher metaphors and reference points, with famous faces to help assure your mind and wallet. It’s Ansel Adams run through Midjourney, a Pirelli calendar shot by a Fallout streamer.

And yet, his output is quite unique and ultimately rather endearing (“I think his heart is in the right place”, says a photographer friend of mine). It’s hard to call Yarrow an iconoclast of any kind, but there is something admirable in his total disregard for the cognoscenti. In a world where ‘bad taste’ is often conflated with highbrow artists making intellectually-schlocky and lurid work, Yarrow feels like the real deal.