The Young Collectors Club
Christie’s Education is excited to have launched of The Young Collectors Club, in collaboration with MTArt Agency, in September 2019.
The club’s mission is to nurture and assist the growing young collectors' movement with education and awareness of the art market and its components, with the aim of helping them to establish and maintain a solid art collection.
Through monthly meetings held at Christie’s Education London on Portland Place, young collectors, and those thinking of establishing a collection, will be able to engage and network with like-minded individuals, who are interested in finding out more about the current art market and share experiences.
Members will be introduced to emerging artists and art world professionals who will help them to navigate the art market landscape, offering guidance each step of the collector’s journey.
We welcome applications from all over the world, but please note all events will take place in London.
Patron Artworks
Patrons will receive one artwork from an MTArt Agency artist to start their collection. Artists to choose from include:
Camila Gonzalez Corea
Camilla is a Costa Rican mixed media artist based in London. At just only 24, she is a rising star in the London art scene. Her recent achievements as an artist include being exhibited in institutions such as the Tate Modern Museum in London and Mana Waynwood during Miami Art Basel, as well as being published in places such as British Vogue and Grazia Magazine.
Her work aims to explore, from a feminist perspective, the relationship between gender and technology. Her interest is heavily focused on activism within social media platforms by showing how behaviours within these digital manifestations can ultimately affect our real lives. She studies and challenges initiatives addressing the exclusion of women in technology, focusing on their representation, or lack of, in the technological world or within technological spheres. By studying the many occurrences of unequal gender politics within said platforms, she aims to single out specific cases of disparity and provoke a dialogue among them. Passion towards this subject and her take on this particular contemporary topic has led Camila to collaborate with advertising giant M&C Saatchi on one of their newest campaigns which address exactly this issue.
Camila’s passion towards feminist activism comes from growing into a family of famous Costa Rican sportspeople where macho behaviours predominated and women either had to prove themselves worthy (to be treated as equals) or conform to the norm and be seen as different. After a lifetime of seeking approval and constant fighting, she realised how this was all wrong and how girls living her same experience need to be empowered and supported. A sisterhood needed to be created. This is why she does what she does today and why all of her pieces either thrive to evoke empowerment and fearlessness in women or seek to question the views of those making someone else feel less.
Currently, with the aim of expanding the parameters of her practice, she is looking to incorporate and explore with different mediums as well as to keep on working on collaborative projects with artists and companies which relate to the topics which her practice explores. Camila’s main aim is to be involved initiatives which she believes will change the toxic perceptions and stereotypes which exist around these topics. She aims to persist on taking an activist approach with her work, as she believes that art can be a powerful vehicle for change.
Lauren Baker
Lauren was born in 1982 and is from Middlesbrough, UK. Currently lives and works in London.
Lauren is a British contemporary multidisciplinary artist who exhibits internationally. Her work explores the fragility of life, energy-fields, the after-life and other dimensions. Using neon light to express universal energies and life mantras, she aims to raise the vibration of love and connection within the world.
Recent works visually interpret unseen energy. Lauren listens to sound frequencies and gets in a meditative state to digitally paint auras and energy, she then incorporates diamond dust, neon and kinetic elements to create celestial artworks. Her most recent collection ‘The Immensity of The Universe’ was firstly released in Saatchi Gallery on Sept 2018 which consists in a sensory experience that explores the origins of the universe and the intriguing beauty born from destruction and chaos.
She has created installations at The V&A, Tate Britain and Tate Modern and her work is held in collections worldwide.
Her limited edition ‘you blow my mind’ screen prints sold out in just 24 hours. Passionate about animals and conservation, Lauren is an ambassador for Save Wild Tigers. Her artwork has raised over £50k for charity.
The Crystal Tigress; a sculpted life-size tiger head encrusted with 52,000 crystals, which toured Asia, and was endorsed by Jimmy Choo and Jaime Winstone, fetched £30,000 at the tiger conservation charity auction for Save Wild Tigers.
Baker’s most intricate work, which sold for £420,000 to an influential sheikh in Qatar, is a Steinway grand piano encrusted with half a million crystals (Feb 15).
In 2012 her art career started with a life-changing trip to South America. Lauren joined a mosaic street-art project in Brazil and took part in ceremonies with shamans in the Peruvian Amazon jungle surrounded by dense vegetation and wildlife. She then researched the best place to study mosaic in the world and developed her skills in Venice (Orsoni, 2012).
Jennifer Abessira
Jennifer is a photographer who works in between Tel Aviv and Paris, but the actual site of her art is her Instagram account. She posts her palpable images daily, creating an intimate journal that belongs to the public. Privacy, for her, is not opposed to being in the open. She does not need a “room of her own,” a studio in which the world’s imposing presence – its noise and flux of images -- could be bracketed. She knows that artistic creation has a strange autonomy, one that is inseparable from the immanence of a life. “To be alive is to be on the alert, to constantly respond to the things I see, to be intensive.”
Intensity is the ABC of Abessira’s existence. And, her art is the best image of that intensity –just as “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” [Wittgenstein]. But, as Abessira knows, the truth of existence is ultimately paradoxical: the intensity of inner life can become meaningful only if it is expressed in form. It would otherwise remain void. And yet, precisely in taking on form, the Inner undergoes an essential change: it is inevitably transfigured, distorted, falsified. Expression is therefore not a re-presentation of a given authentic emotion, but a way of conjuring up an emotion in the already overcrowded space of daily images. This congested space is where Jennifer Abessira operates.
The fact that contemporary experience is inundated with an incessant flow of images is a starting point for her. “Images can all too easily hide the truth of things from us, but they are often our sole access to that truth.” Images – their shining, their beauty– are what she both loves and distrusts and this distrust and love is what her work constantly negotiates. She proceeds through constant attunement to what would be “the right image” in the right place and time. But the colorful images she creates are not about capturing the evanescent now and have nothing to do with photography’s nostalgia for the lost presence of bygone moments. Showing everyday objects, routine actions, minute and large scale architecture – as well as a multitude of image-appearances in books, magazines and TV screens -- her images refuse to pursue -- or idealize -- the authenticity of the instant. Instead, she wants her images to be active rather than reactive. She wants them to do actual work within the domain of the visual. For her, productive images have a purpose, which she understands a la Godard: “Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires.” Vague ideas hide the void from us. Clear images open up possibilities, new ways of feeling, speaking and acting vis-à-vis the impossible.
In Abessira’s life, her images function as a coordinate-system for managing the formless and chaotic. She has always been attracted to archives and archival work and, in this sense, “Instagram comes in easy, with the simple platform it provides for organizing things.” In her Instagram journal, chaos and void do not disappear. They are fully present. But, they appear through idiosyncratic modulations of order instantiated by a system of sardonic hashtags: #She Wanted to Die but She also Wanted to Live in Paris/ #A Girl is a Gun Peow Peow/ #Tel Aviv Forever/ # The Triumph of Vegetation is Total/ #Contribution to a Theory of Architecture, etc.
Abessira carefully tags her images. Her hashtags are the verbal seams of a multi-leveled visual matrix. Encountering her work, we look at a new atlas of images that dreams of an infinite catalogue while speaking to us in an intensity that cannot be represented.
Programme of Events
17 October 2019 - Launch Event
Speakers – Glen Hardwick-Bruce – Christie’s Education
Charlotte Fletcher - Collector
Marine Tanguy – MTArt Agency
Pacheanne Anderson – Christie’s Education Trust – 2019 Scholarship holder
Robyn Orovwuje – Christie’s Education Trust – 2019 Scholarship holder
20 November 2019
Georgia Powell, CURA - The History of Collecting, and the Role of Collectors Today
26 November 2019
Gasworks dinner – For Young Collector Patrons
12 December 2019
Christmas Party
17 January 2020
Where to Buy Art – Elizabeth Dellert UK Fair Director - The Affordable Art Fair
23 January 2020
London Art Fair – VIP tour and drinks
Start Time: 6.30pm
Maximum 20 people – Invitations will be sent out soon.
20 February 2020
TBC Panel Discussion – Insurance/logistics/framing
6 March
Where to Buy Art: The Other Art Fair - Talk by Fair Director
Start Time: 6.30pm
18 March 2020
Geoff Lowsley – Managing a Collection
Start Time: 6.30pm
19 March
VIP Access and private tour of The Other Art Fair
Start Time: 6.30pm
22 April 2020
Georgia Spray/Partnership Editions
6 May 2020
Vishal – Big data/trends in Art
12 June 2020
Summer Party
Terms and Conditions
Liability for Annual Subscription
Membership will be confirmed only once payment is made.
Registration is on a strictly first come first served basis.
i)Except as provided by these Rules every member shall pay a subscription for each year at the rate applicable for them that year.
ii) The rates of subscription for each year shall be fixed from time to time by Christie’s Education before December 1st in the preceding year: and any rate so fixed shall continue in force for each subsequent year until varied by Christie’s Education.
iii) The category of membership for each member shall be determined at the beginning of the year for which the subscription is payable.
Payment of Annual Subscription
A member must pay the current annual subscription in a single lump sum equal to the current annual subscription.
