The Muse Gallery - Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Heath 2025

MUSE GALLERY TAKE-OVER OF LONDON BOROUGH GALLERY LOCATIONS CONTINUES

Affordable Art Fair 7 – 11 May 2025

Celebrations continue for the Muse Gallery’s 20th anniversary at it’s home location on Portobello Road, with the gallery expanding into new locations in Brentford and Gray’s Inn Road. Defying the trend of many galleries to close their in person spaces and go online, Muse doesn’t stop there, as the gallery now has Hampstead firmly in it’s sights.

Its inaugural stand at the Affordable Art Fair is a statement of intent by the gallery’s director Damian Rayne, that, while owing it’s origins to the astonishing creativity that the Portobello area fosters, the growing national and international reputation of the gallery’s artists has earned the well-deserved attention of the Affordable Art Fair.

“I have always kept the multi-cultural, multi-faceted values of Portobello as a defining guide to our curatorial decisions at the Muse”, says Rayne, “so it is not a departure from our commitment to supporting local artists, or offering residency opportunities to recent graduates, but an acknowledgement of their much-deserved enhanced reputations, to take them to new markets where their work can find new collectors looking for exciting work that is, as the fair suggests, and as our gallery insists, ‘affordable”.

With recent exhibitions dedicated to honouring the long-standing reputation of legendary Portobello photographer Charlie Philipps, among others, the Brentford and Gray’s Inn gallery’s are also showcasing experimental film and theatre, while also being home to the annual Portobello Film Festival, Portobello Radio and Tavistock Festival. Works that will be exhibited at the Muse stand include sculpture, photography, painting, textile and drawing, reflecting the commitment to all forms of artistic practice.

The five artists selected from Muse’s roster of over 50 artists to introduce Muse Gallery to Affordable, have been selected as they each share a profound interest in the ethereal qualities of the natural world, and art’s ability to communicate things we feel but can’t explain - the very essence of nature and it’s ability to mystify and delight us.

press information please contact:

Curator

Gosia Łapsa-Malawska

gosia@malawska.com

+44 7745938472

Our exhibiting artists

  • Sun Ju Lee

    Lee transforms photographed shadows into evocative intermedial artworks that reinterpret and reconstruct familiar contexts.

  • Eleni Maragaki

    Eleni Maragaki is a printmaker and sculptor whose work is focused on the exploration of the meeting points between urban construction and the natural environment. As a response to the densely manufactured urban space, she is inspired by the delicacy found in the system of natural structures, aiming to transcend the immense non-organic flows of life that constitute the landscape, such as mountains and seas, through her linocut prints.

  • Louisa Crispin

    Lost in a world of intricate observations from nature, Louisa is entranced by the cycle of growth and decay. It’s quiet in her Kent studio and garden as she looks ever closer at the flora and fauna. Texture, shadows, silhouettes and movement created with graphite marks and tone, it’s rarely about the colour but always about the environment.

  • Michael Henley

    Often looking into the darker elements of the natural world and the human form Henley’s work uses highly detailed graphite drawings and ink paintings to explore humanity’s connection to nature, death, life and ultimately our disconnection from them. Henley’s work often creates windows to other worlds, a glimpse into otherwise only partially viewed scenes where skulls and snakes overlay one another. Backlit elements of each piece, which would otherwise be hidden beneath layers of paper and drawing invite the viewer to peer behind the build up of form and shape to find more of the story.

  • Catriona Robertson

    Catriona Robertson imagines a post-human future where nature reclaims the city through the cracks of concrete foundations. Her sculptures resemble future fossils, relics of an urban geology emerging as hybrid ecosystems and new age sediments of the Anthropocene, as the synthetic intertwines with the organic.