Not your typical art collectors

Like it or not, the art world survives on collectors. Philanthropists and foundations funded by high-net worth individuals play a big part in ensuring that established artists hold fort while emerging artists climb the ranks. It’s easy to assume this part of the art world is made up exclusively of management consultants, men in finance or those with family wealth. And yes, there is truth to the stereotype.

But many people collect. And they’re not all management consultants, men in finance or those with family wealth. Some are creative-leaning, on-the-ground types who work in adjacent industries (fashion, nightlife, media) or as independent gallerists – albeit on a typically smaller scale. Rarely are they mentioned in the same breath as capital-C collectors despite an integral role in the market.

Indeed, you could argue that these non-traditional patrons – with more humble or off-beat collections, made up of gifts and choice purchases – are a starting point in the market trend cycle. Before an early- or mid-career artist’s wares are picked up by a blue-chip and later bought by a billionaire collector’s art advisor, they’re probably first displayed inside a fashion designer or club kid’s bedroom. Certainly, that was the case with Basquiat and Haring.

This alternative contingent of art patrons is not so much ‘young’. Rather, many are creative veterans, long connected to the burgeoning scene, and by way of that, household names of the future (and now). Their assets might cost a fortune or nish, but such London taste-makers maintain serious, salon-hung homes – and probably don’t care about the non-dom exodus.

Here, we meet them.

Sinéad O’Dwyer, fashion designer

Irish designer and RCA alum, O’Dwyer is a core figure amongst the old-sandwich-shop-dwelling gallery goers. In fact, she’s close friends with one of Ginny on Frederick’s earliest breakthrough artists, Jack O’Brien, who won the Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze London in 2023. Just recently, O’Dwyer and her wife, Ottilie Landmark, procured a mixed-media drawing from O’Brien as a gift. “It’s a beautiful and strange (very Jack) gesture/creature,” she says of the work. “I am so happy we own a piece of his world.”

Also part of that same, chicly clad, bohemian set, Filipino artist Nicole Coson – who wore custom Sinéad O’Dywer to her wedding this summer – appears in the couple’s collection. Several years ago, O’Dwywer and Landmark were gifted a printed canvas from Coson’s Exoskeleton series, which aired at Silverlens Galleries in Manila in 2021. “There is simultaneously a gravity and lightness to the work that is amazing,” says O’Dwyer.

Drawn to cerebral and challenging East End project spaces and galleries, O’Dwyer follows a set of programmes. “I am really excited to see what will happen at Chisenhale Gallery now that Edward Gillman is the new director,” she tells us. She’s also big on Gillman’s successor at Auto Italia, Maggie Matić, another indication of her conceptual and queer artistic penchant. “Being connected to art is important to me to help find meaning in [or] think through my own industry,” she explains. In this vein, Anya Gorkova’s ‘Are You Seeing Anyone’ (2023) exhibition at South Parade featured a specially made garment by O’Dwyer.

Currently, O’Dywer doesn’t own her own abode – “a lot of unhung canvases!” – but that doesn’t stop her. “We enjoy saving to have our works framed beautifully in anticipation of their eventual home,” she confirms. Who’s taken her fancy recently? Daria Blum impressed O’Dwyer with her performances at Ginny on Frederick and Tate Modern’s The Tanks early this year, and London-based painter Michael Ho remains a favourite. Otherwise, she’s looking forward to Nicoletti gallery’s Frieze Focus presentation of Gray Wielebinski and a performance from this year’s Frieze London Artist Award winner, Sophia Al-Maria. “The work will take the format of a daily comedy show, and I am SO intrigued,” she says of the latter. See you in the tent, Sinéad.

Cozette McCreery, fashion consultant

Aside from her days as door bitch for late-noughties sceney-iest club, Boombox, McCreery is something of a fashion (and art) industry fixture. She co-founded the brand Sibling, worked as Bella Freud’s PA and design assistant for 12 years, and held a bevy of other roles at Max Mara, Jasper Conran and more. Today, she’s a visiting lecturer at the University of East London and works closely with milliners Noel Stewart and Stephen Jones – to name a few gigs. Like her career, her art collection is rich and historied. She’s got provenance!

As a youngster, McCreery joined her family on trips to St Ives, enamoured by Barbara Hepworth’s Burmese wood piece, Infant (1929), as well as works by local painter (and relative on McCreery’s grandmother’s side) Tony O’Malley. “No, I didn’t come away with one of his paintings but, almost out of sight, I’d seen a chalk-like carving of a baby from another artist and hounded my mother to return to the gallery the next day,” remembers McCreery. “It’s the closest I’ve got to owning something in the style of Infant.”

Today, McCreery follows a similarly instinctual approach to collecting. “I’m not going to flip pieces and make my fortune, so the item needs to make me happy when I look at it for a very long period of time,” she says. As such, the collection namechecks a lot of peers and pals, from photographers Roxy Lee – McCreery recently picked up a few key-ring photo works at the Martine Rose SS26 Market – and Sharna Osborne through to Sue Tilley and John Booth. A Chapman Brothers edition she got for her 40th sits amongst them. “Nothing is hung up because I keep spending my money on house repairs,” she laughs.

One of the most prized possessions she has is an ink drawing by Lucian Freud, which he gifted her. Notably, McCreery had also sat for Freud as the subject of Irish Woman On A Bed (2003–2004). She recounts that artists Leigh Bowery and wife Nicola Rainbird were often telling her to meet Lucian well before, but she was otherwise engaged with work. “I didn’t sit for him until I stopped working for Bella,” she says. “He called me up and said ‘I hear you are unemployed? YIPPEEE! When can you sit?’” Currently, she’s obsessing over a Gary Card bunny on show at the Plaster Store. “If I wasn’t in the middle of being a grown up and buying my freehold, I’d have nabbed it.”

Lara Johnson-Wheeler, writer and editor

Despite working largely in the fashion sphere (a Condé Nast girlie), Johnson-Wheeler is also an adept custodian of art. She’s quick to describe her collection as “modest”, but it’s visibly esoteric, chiming with her naturally high-low sensibility. Amongst trinkets and oddities, works by her late grandmother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl – whose works recently showed at Bethlem Museum of Mind – appear throughout. The first artwork Johnson-Wheeler was gifted, it transpires, was a drawing of her dressed in a strawberry-patched gingham dress by Johnson-Wahl. “Later, she gave me a huge oil painting of a man and a woman smoking in front of a circle of dystopian dancing people and a self-portrait,” says Johnson-Wheeler. “It’s always contentious in the family about who has what, and my mother is still fuming I have these lilies [pictured].”

Besides these inherited works, the bent of Johnson-Wheeler’s display is a little more playful, tapping into themes of clothing, food (a devilled egg ceramic by Katy Stubbs), sex (a face-sitting print by Namio Harukawa) and gossip – all pastimes Johnson-Wheeler adores. One standout work includes a painting by her husband Patrick Müller, a German art director, depicting her Margiela Tabi boots with a cigarette lodged between the toes. “I don’t really think I have a distinct personal taste, but a big part of choosing to marry Patrick was for his tastes,” she admits. “Maybe in part for his collection too.” To her point, the newly-weds now share an exquisite Roe Ethridge still life (Oysters), a Julian Irlinger and a polaroid of Müller shot by Gus Van Sant.

In terms of galleries she follows, her taste sits towards the newer school: Ginny on Frederick (duh!), Rose Easton and Brunette Coleman. “The Perimeter is also always a wild ride,” she adds. “I love Alexandra Metcalf’s show there recently; so nostalgic and pervy.”

While Johnson-Wheeler can’t pinpoint her most prized work, she does share a list of some high-ranking favourites, including a high-kitsch snap of her and Müller playing on a fruit machine in a Wetherspoons – a marriage portrait by Anton Gottlob. The mounting is simple. “Our house is very white and grey in design with these crazy fake marble fossil countertops, so we spill colour all over it,” she explains of her generously lined interiors. “We don’t really curate our home. At least not yet, as we only just moved in.”

Princess Julia, DJ

It’s no exaggeration to say that Her Royal Highness, née Julia Fodor, has been a major patron of the emerging (and established art world) in London for decades. Certainly, anyone who’s popped by the ‘Leigh Bowery!’ show over at Tate Modern will have spotted the DJ in a Derek Ridgers snap manning the coat check at Taboo, Bowery’s legendary club. Delve a little deeper, though, and you’ll soon discover that Julia also cameos in the works of Bowery’s close friend, filmmaker and artist John Maybury (she also owns a size-able painting by the artist from circa 1991) and video artist Charles Atlas. Right now, her beautiful mug is on show at Wolfgang Tillmans’ ‘Nothing could have prepared us’ retrospective in a work she herself was gifted by gallerist Maureen Paley.

In addition to being an artist in her own right – recognised for haunting paint portraits and illustrations – she’s also long been genned-up on fine art, citing an early experience age ten, when she visited a Kinetic art survey at Hayward Gallery in 1970. “I grew up going to art galleries,” she says. Naturally, Julia has her favourites: the aforementioned Maureen Paley and Sadie Coles HQ sit hit high on the list. “I just really admire her tastes and themes – her and [director] Pauline Daly,” says Julia of the latter. She also gives a shoutout to the late Lux Gallery in Hoxton Square founded by Gregor Muir [now director of the collection at Tate] in 1997. “His book Lucky Kunst is a must-read if you want to get a feel for the art scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Undoubtedly, Julia has seared her name into the circuit. Yet, she has never rested on her laurels, remaining a fierce proponent of the new. Her latest purchase was a Jamie Bull (4FSB) work aired at his debut London solo show with Ridley Road Project Space. “I absolutely love the way he manipulates his subject matter,” she says. Elsewhere, her East London flat, which she describes as “functional”, is decked with Simon Popper paintings, a Max Allen wall work, a Richard Porter sculpture, a Duggie Fields, and a rather cute Lydia Blakeley. If money was no object, Julia would “invest” in Celia Hempton. Smart.

Jonny Tanna, director of Harlesden High Street Gallery

Tanna has one of the tightest visions in London, heading up a gallery that only shows artists of colour, favours atypical practices and stands proud in an ungentrified pocket of Zone 3 London. His program and personal taste, naturally, crossover. Before he ran Harlesden High Street, he worked as an artist, but his collaborative tendencies often opened out the shows. “All the solo projects I had would turn into group projects as I enjoy how artists respond to the thematic exhibitions I put together,” he explains. He calls out Jenny’s, now based in New York, and closer to home, Carlos/Ishikawa, as spaces he admires. “I notice they mostly only show their own artists that they represent,” he says of the latter.

The most prized works in his collection? “I hate to be biased and talk about my own artists but Sir Dogg (2014) by Joe Cool, a special Tupac commission by Riskie Brent, and a Joe Cool commission by Toby ‘Cato’ Grant, whom we’re showing at Frieze this year.” Tanna’s aesthetic inclinations, he admits, tie in with his own childhood, growing up on Death Row Records, the legendary ‘90s rap label. That said, he’s always hunting for fresh ideas and new faces on the come up, having supported Rachel Jones (Blessing Pon Blessings, 2021), Emmanuel Shogbolu (Pieces of a SCATTSMAN, 2023) and Macrus Jefferson (Free Cuzzy, 2024), as well as global icons, not least Lee “Scratch” Perry.

The gallerist, who lives with his mother nearby, tells us the first piece he ever acquired was a gift from the Malaysia-born artist Mandy El-Sayegh, who showed with Harlesden in 2021. Made from obscure magazines of Tanna’s, the resulting work was an attempt to stop him hoarding, reflective of his and El-Sayegh’s shared love for serial killer and stalker lore. “Mandy was there when I was stalked by some creepy Tupac internet fanatics,” he says.

On his wishlist, though, is Baghdad-born artist, Mohammed Sami, a Goldsmiths MFA alum whose work brings together fragments of his experiences living through Saddam Hussein’s Iraq presidency. “If I could afford or obtain a small work of his, I would snap it up,” says Tanna. Sold.