British Art Fair Co-Founder and Director, Gay Hutson, shares her memories of 40 years running art fairs.

Has Long and Ryle got bigger? No, the Pimlico gallery hasn’t had an extension: they are currently showing the latest exhibition of the painter John Monks, a modern master of perspective.

‘Potty for it!’ gushed an Elle Magazine headline in October 2022, describing ‘the new wave of ceramics that have reached cult status’. And the jaunty pot puns didn’t stop there: ‘as designers blur the lines between art and function,’ continued the fashion mag’s on-form sub-editor, ‘it seems everyone’s got the hots for pots.’

Filmmaker and ‘digitalist’ Rebekah Tolley-Georgiou is curating a cutting-edge digital art exhibition for British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. Here she explains to Alex Leith how advances in technology have given the art world its latest ‘ism’.

British Art Fair has teamed up with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust to organise an exciting new show. On display throughout the 2024 fair at Saatchi Gallery, the Trust will exhibit a selection of Barns-Graham paintings, including late-career prints and three original works on paper from her ‘Glacier’ series.

In May this year, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 1945 oil painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold at Sotheby’s New York for a staggering $28.5 million, the highest sum ever achieved at auction by a female British painter. To put this in context, no painting by Salvador Dalí has attracted such a price tag.

The British public’s horrified reaction to the sickening criminal felling last autumn of one of Britain’s best-loved natural landmarks – the famous sycamore near Once Brewed on Hadrian’s Wall – is testament to the country’s deep-seated love of trees.

The founding President of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds dismissed still life painting as a minor genre, lower in the pecking order than historical paintings, landscapes and portraits. And to a certain extent, this stigma still lingers. It’s just something landscape painters do to fill the time when it’s raining, right?

Wrong.

The second major show at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, an Untold Story, raises more questions than it answers.

Highlights of British artists at public art galleries this winter.

Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist, Euan Uglow, would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.

This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.

Iona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.

To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James

One of the great loves of Lucian Freud’s life was his dog Pluto, a whippet who he named after the Greek God of the Underworld.

Pluto was present in Freud’s studio from 1988 to her death in 2003, his most prolific period, and was frequently painted by the artist, with and without human companions.

You can see Freud’s 1988 etching of Pluto in the current exhibition at London gallery Browse & Darby, until January 24.

In 1920, 27-year-old Slade School graduate Lucy Harwood had an emergency appendix operation on the kitchen table of the house she lived in. 3 days later, it was discovered she was paralysed down her right side, and had lost the use of the right hand she painted with. But she was determined not to give up painting.

Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions, which runs until April 14, is the third in an ongoing series at Firstsite exploring the careers of Benton End artists.

Sean Jefferson: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Works runs at David Messum Fine Art, St James until December 22.

Each painting demands a careful reading, though few viewers will be able to decipher all the folkloric and spiritual symbols. It’s a feast of fairies, sprites, jesters, druids, winged dogs, ominous ravens, runic symbols, gnarly trees, medicinal herbs and slivers of moon in yellow skies.

In 2006, the painter Hurvin Anderson accompanied his father to his regular barbershop, situated in a converted attic in the centre of Birmingham.

It was a Jamaican barbershop, which made the father – a Windrush immigrant – feel at home, as it was designed to do, painted in bright colours, the walls covered with posters of iconic black figures and newspaper cuttings: a very Caribbean clutter.

Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings runs at Hastings Contemporary until March 3.

Discover the latest show at Long & Ryle gallery of Nick Archer, as well as a brief history of his practice.

In 1970 the Chinese experimental artist Li Yuan-Chi moved from London to the village of Banks, in Cumbria, just north of Hadrian’s Wall. His motive? To single-handedly convert a derelict farmhouse into an art centre, turning cowsheds into galleries.

Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge, are running the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-Chi and Friends, from November 11 to February 18, marking the profound impact the artist’s idiosyncratic Cumbrian venture had on 20th-century British art.

A work by David Spiller is instantly recognisable. Influenced by Picasso and Dubuffet, as much as Disney and Warhol, his canvases, stitched together by hand, display a smorgasbord of competing styles and techniques. They are usually dominated by a representation of a cartoon character.

Spiller’s estate is represented in the UK by Portland Gallery on Bennet St, St James, which is, from November 8 – December 1, showing the last of a trilogy of exhibitions of his work, this one dedicated to his output between 2010 and his death in 2018.

2023 has been an eventful year for the painter Anthony Eyton. In May he celebrated his 100th birthday. In June he was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first Birthday Honours, and was featured in an exhibition of portraits at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery, alongside Arturo di Stefano. And in September he enjoyed the opening of a retrospective of his work at Browse and Darby. The show continues until November 10.