The tradition of the Momart Christmas Card goes back to 1984 when the first object – a festive card – was designed for us by Bruce McLean.

IDRIS KHAN

Born in 1978, Idris Khan OBE completed his master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in 2004. He was appointed an OBE for services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List, and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Worcester in 2018. Drawing inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, Idris Khan investigates memory, creativity and the layering of experience.

Khan's works – in media including sculpture, painting and photography – rely on a continuous process of creation and erasure, or the adding of new layers while retaining traces of what has gone before. He is well known for his large-scale works in which techniques of layering are used to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new through repetition and superimposition

CONRAD SHAWCROSS

Throughout his career, Conrad Shawcross RA (b. 1977) has experimented with ideal geometries, topologies and progressions. Invariably based on systems, his works sometimes contain a mechanical element and often pay tribute to some of the great pioneers and analysts of our age. Cloaked in the aesthetic of rational design, his works appear to be useful, forcing the viewer to consider their purpose or function. Yet the works remain illusive as they defy final definition, and remain in the realm of the philosophical, metaphysical and conceptual. Through their failure as systems and models, they succeed as art works, asking questions rather than answering them.

Des Hughes was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1970. His work bears witness to an obsessive, physical enquiry into the materials, methods and traditions of sculpture. Hughes re-thinks conventional materials such as plaster, marble, bronze and clay. Nothing is as it first appears. For example, crudely modelled clay might be meticulously cast in resin but, with the inclusion of marble dust, it may appear to have been carved and polished from a block of stone or fashioned from a piece of chewing gum.

At the same time, Hughes considers the purpose or meaning of sculpture — from the functional doorstop to the sacred effigy. In recent years he introduced cross-stitch as a sculptural medium, which now offers a running commentary throughout his practice as a whole.

Paul Fryer (born 1963) is a British artist whose enquiries have been mostly concerned with the big questions of life and how technology and philosophy might impact our relationship to a changing world.

Since first exhibiting in 1996, his work has been shown in numerous galleries worldwide, including the Royal Academy and Tate Britain. Fryer is also part of many international collections.

His work assumes many forms, as Fryer adopts complex and diverse techniques, such as x-ray photography, lenticular printing, sculpture and painting as a means to explore notions of temporality, physics and the universe.

Paul Fryer lives and works in London.

Clare Woods (born 1972) is a British artist best known for her large scale paintings. She completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, London in 1999, after a BA in Fine Art at Bath College of Art in 1994.

Her paintings are essentially concerned with sculpting an image in paint, and expressing the strangeness of an object. Woods’ choice of subject matter is primarily based on an intuitive response to found photographic source material.

Her work is included in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Arts Council Collection, London; British Council, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; Government Art Collection, The Nation Collection of Wales, Cardiff; Southampton City Art Gallery and Tullie House Gallery, Carlisle.

Clare Woods lives and works in London and the Welsh borders.

Patrick Hughes (born 1939) is a British artist, widely recognised as one of the major painters of contemporary British art. He is also a designer, teacher and writer.

Hughes’ is known for his reverse perspective sculptured paintings, which look as if he has pulled the perspective in a flat painting out into real space in a uniquely plastic way. The see-er moving in front of the works creates the illusion that the paintings are moving from side to side and up and down. 

Hughes’ has had more than a hundred solo shows at galleries and museums around the world and his work is held in many public collections including The Tate Gallery, The British Council, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Library, Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, Northeast University, Boston and the Würth Museum, Germany.

Patrick Hughes lives and works in Shoreditch, London.

Glenn Brown (born 1966) is a British Artist. He studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education, and Goldsmith's College, London. Brown was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000.

The subject matter in his artwork ranges from his early science-fiction landscapes over abstract compositions and still lives to the figurative images based on art historical references. His virtuosic paintings and sculptures are included in many private and public collections.

His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d’Art Contemporain, France (2000); Serpentine Gallery, London (2004); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2008); Tate Liverpool, England (2009), which travelled to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest; Upton House, England (2012) and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2013).

Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British sculptor and conceptual artist. He studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1986 - 1989, and at the Royal College of Art from 1989 - 1991.

He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art.

Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Turk uses his signature as a recurrent motif through which to explore the way an artist's mark can embody aesthetic and commercial value.

Turk was awarded the Jack Goldhill Sculpture Prize in 2001, and the Charles Wollaston award in 2007.

Toby Zeigler (born 1972) is a London-born artist known for playing with perception.

His paintings and sculptures orchestrate a continual oscillation between abstraction and figuration, and between classical composition and its digital manipulation and obfuscation.

His process often begins with the appropriation of an image which, through endless reproduction, has passed into the visual subconscious. The image is then rendered by computer into modular planes, worked on, developed, and modified. If the final result is a sculpture, it is fabricated in three dimensions, often in cardboard or wood, or, as in the most recent works, in oxidised aluminium skins.

His work is included in major public and private collections worldwide.

Toby Zeigler lives and works in London, England.

Catherine Yass (born 1963) is an English photographer. She trained at the Slade School of Art, London; the Hochschüle der Künst, Berlin; and Goldsmiths College, London. In 2002, Yass was shortlisted for The Turner Prize.

She is best known for her distinctive photographic and film based work. Typically she manipulates her subject matter by overlaying the negative and the positive from photographs she has taken and then realises the resultant images as lightboxes, prints and films.

Her work features in a number of major important collections worldwide including Tate, London; Arts Council of England, The British Council and the Government Art Collection, London; The Jewish Museum, New York; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts Collection, Washington DC.

Catherine Yass lives and works in London.

Richard Hughes (born 1974) is a British visual artist. He studies at the Staffordshire University and the Goldsmiths College, London.

Hughes’ sculptural practice is engaged in the counter-productive act of manufacturing decay and illusion, creating objects that evoke, through their weathered appearance, the aftermath of good times past. Far from simple ready-mades, Hughes’ works are laborious copies of discarded junk. They appear as residual artefacts that incarnate the point at which working class suburban culture enters into the mainstream, dragging along with it a slew of improper objects.

Richard Hughes has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions including solo exhibitions at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, The Modern Institute and Sadie Coles HQ in London, Michael Benevento in Los Angeles, as well as the Tate Britain’s Sculpture Court as part of the Art Now series, London.

Richard Hughes lives and works in London.

Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom. His early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films. In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery.

His sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. Mueck sculpts in clay, makes a plaster mould around it and finally replaces the clay with a mixture of fibreglass, silicone and resin. Tackling traditional themes such as self-portraiture or the age-old question of verisimilitude in art, Mueck applies skills more usually associated with theatrical or cinematic special effects, to engender a personal understanding of the art object.

Ron Mueck lives and works in London, England

David Hockney (born 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. He attended the Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957. In 1959, he entered graduate school at the Royal College of Art in London.

Known for his photo collages and paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, David Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. Born with synesthesia, he sees synesthetic colours in response to musical stimuli. This does not show up in his painting or photography artwork, but is a common underlying principle in his designs for stage sets for ballet and opera—where he bases background colours and lighting on the colours he sees while listening to the piece's music.

His works are in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

David Hockney lives and works in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, and Kensington, London.

Paul McDevitt (born 1972) is a Scottish artist. He studied at the Jacob Kramer College of Art & Design in Leeds, Visual Arts at the Lancaster University and Chelsea College of Art & Design in London.

He works with the artistic media drawing, sculpture and performance art, and has participated in several curating projects. His mixed media paintings combine rigorous formal and photographic practices with the influence of graffiti, iconic cartoon characters, and graphic design found in old European publications.

McDevitt’s works have been exhibited at a number of international venues as well as in various solo exhibitions at galleries in Europe including Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Sommer & Kohl, Berlin.

Paul McDevitt lives and works in London and in Berlin.

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was a German-born British painter and draughtsman. Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. He also attended Goldsmiths' College from 1942–3.

Known chiefly for his thickly impastoed portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. Freud’s many studies of the nude make up a major part of his work. His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Beginning in the 1980s, Freud was increasingly drawn toward what could be called extreme body types.

Although the human form dominated his output, Freud also executed cityscapes, viewed from his studio window, and obsessively detailed nature studies.

Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) was a British painter, printmaker and collector. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art between 1949-50, followed by the Bath Academy of Art between 1950-1954.

Hodgkin's paintings and prints often refer to memories and private experiences, but deliberately avoid the illustrational. Though his works often appear spontaneous, they are often the result of an extensive process of layering and over-painting. Since the 1950s, he has made a substantial number of original prints and, over the last twenty years has favoured the use of etching and aquatint combined with hand-painting.

In 1985, Hodgkin won the Turner Prize and represented Britain in the Venice Biennale.

His work has been the subject of numerous major retrospectives and his paintings and prints are held by most major museums worldwide.

Mark Wallinger (born 1959) is an English painter, sculptor and video artist. He studied in London at the Chelsea School of Art (1978–81) and Goldsmiths College (1983–5).

From the mid 1980s his work has addressed the traditions and values of British society, its class system and organised religion. In the early 1990s he began using a personal enthusiasm for horse racing as a theme through which to explore issues of ownership and pedigree.

In the late 1990s Wallinger shifted his focus to a questioning of institutionalised spirituality and religion. The scepticism and irreverence of his work, typical of his humorous observational approach, were downplayed in a later public sculpture commissioned for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square: Ecce Homo.

In 2001 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in 2007 he was awarded the Turner Prize.

Gary Hume (born 1962) is an English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His work is strongly identified with the YBA artists who came to prominence in the early 1990s. He emerged as one of the leading figures of the group of young artists working in London in the 1990s.

After graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1988, Hume achieved early success with paintings based on hospital doors, rendered with gloss on panel and displayed in groups of four. He is known for figurative and abstract paintings on aluminium panels, which often feature startling colour combinations made with paints purchased premixed from a hardware store.

Hume was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1996 and represented Britain at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999.

Gary Hume lives and works in London and Accord, New York.

Tracey Emin (born 1963) is an English artist. She studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists).

Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. She reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous. She has exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America.

Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and in 2007 represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Tracey Emin lives and works in London.

Artists, Ben Langlands (born 1955) and Nikki Bell (born 1959) explore the complex web of relationships linking people and architecture and the coded systems of mass-communications and exchange we use to negotiate an increasingly fast changing technological world.

Langlands & Bell have been collaborating since 1978. Their art ranges from film and digital media projects to sculpture, installation, and full-scale architecture. It focuses on the structures we inhabit and the networks that permeate and link them, while reflecting at a wider global level on the many ways space is encoded as social, political or economic territory.

Langlands & Bell have exhibited internationally throughout their career including in exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the Imperial War Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, at IMMA, Dublin, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, MoMA, New York, and the Central House of the Artist, Moscow. 

Damien Hirst (born 1965) is an English sculptor, installation artist, painter, printmaker, entrepreneur, and art collector. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London (1986–9), and in 1988 curated the exhibition Freeze. He was a leading figure in the group of ‘Young British Artists' (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s.

His works are explicitly concerned with the fundamental dilemmas of human existence; his constant themes have included the fragility of life, society's reluctance to confront death, and the nature of love and desire, often clothed in titles which exist somewhere between the naive and the disingenuous.

Hirst's interest in contemporary society is further reflected in collaborative pop music projects and in his designs for the Pharmacy and Quo Vadis restaurants, London. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.

Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon.

Richard Deacon (born 1949) is a British abstract sculptor, and a winner of the Turner Prize in 1987. He studied at Somerset College of Art, Taunton from 1968 to 1969, St Martin’s School of Art, London from 1969 to 1972 and the Royal College of Art, London from 1974 to 1977. He studied part time at Chelsea School of Art, London in 1978.

Deacon's work is abstract, but often alludes to anatomical functions. His works are often constructed from everyday materials such as laminated plywood, and include small-scale works suitable for showing in art galleries, as well as much larger pieces shown in sculpture gardens and objects made for specific events, such as dance performances.

His first solo show was held in 1978 at The Gallery, Brixton, London. This led to a string of solo exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. 

Peter Blake (born 1932) is an English pop artist, best known for co-creating the sleeve design for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He studied at Gravesend Art School 1948–51; served in the R.A.F. 1951–3; continued his studies at the R.C.A. 1953–6.

Peter Blake's work reflects his fascination with all streams of popular culture, and the beauty to be found in everyday objects and surroundings. Many of his works feature found printed materials such as photographs, comic strips or advertising texts, combined with bold geometric patterns and the use of primary colours.

An honorary doctor of the Royal College of Art, his work crosses all generational divides, and inspires great respect from younger artists.

Peter Blake lives and works in London.

Dame Paula Rego (born 1935) is British painter and printmaker of Portuguese birth. Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was soon exhibiting as one of the London Group with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach, later becoming artist-in-residence at the National Gallery.

She first won acclaim in Portugal with semi-abstract paintings that sometimes included collage elements culled from her own drawings. Their satiric wit and verve of line, sometimes applied to violent or political subjects revealed gifts for story-telling that had been awakened in her as a child by folk-tales related by a great-aunt.

Her most well known depictions of folk tales and images of young girls, made largely since 1990, bring together the methods of painting and printmaking with an emphasis on strong and clearly drawn forms. Her work often reflects an aggressive feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.

Anthony Caro (1924–2013) was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects. He studied engineering at Christ's College, Cambridge, and afterwards sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic 1946 and at the R.A. Schools 1947–52. He worked as part-time assistant to Henry Moore 1951–3.

Caro has played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century sculpture. He came to public attention with a show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, where he exhibited large abstract sculptures brightly painted and standing directly on the ground so that they engage the spectator on a one-to-one basis.

Caro often worked in steel, but also in a diverse range of other materials, including bronze, silver, lead, stoneware, wood and paper. Since the 1950s, Caro's work has been shown museums and galleries worldwide.

Helen Chadwick (1953–1996) was an English sculptor, photographer and installation artist. She studied at Brighton Polytechnic (1973–6) and the Chelsea School of Art, London (1976–7).

Chadwick's innovative and provocative use of a rich variety of materials, such as flesh, flowers, chocolate and fur, was hugely influential on a younger generation of British artists. Her strongly associative and visceral images were intended to question gender representation and the nature of desire. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s her work became richer and more direct in impact.

Helen Chadwick was exhibited world-wide both in solo and mixed shows, she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987, she received countless awards and commissions and her work is in major collections both in the UK and across the globe.

Helen Chadwick lived and worked in London.

Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi (1924–2005) was a Scottish sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer. He attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with a view to becoming a commercial artist. In 1944 he attended St Martin's School of Art in London, and from 1945 to 1947 he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art.

In the 1940s and '50s, he made sculptures and collages that combined surrealism with pop culture and modern machinery. In the 1960s, he further incorporated machinery into his art. He spent the 1970s working on abstract art reliefs. Through the 1980s and '90s, he took public commissions.

In 1949, Paolozzi started teaching at the London's Central School of Art and Design. Throughout his career as an artist, Paolozzi would teach at a number of art institutions, including his alma mater, St. Martin's School of Art.

Bill Woodrow (born 1948), is a British sculptor. He studied at Winchester College of Art from 1967–68, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, from 1968–71 and Chelsea School of Art from 1971–72.

Woodrow’s early work was made from materials found in dumps, used car lots and scrap yards, partially embedded in plaster and appearing as if they had been excavated. He went on to use large consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, cutting the sheet metal and allowing the original structure to remain identifiable, with the cut out attached, as if by an umbilical cord, to the mother form.

Woodrow’s first solo exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1972. Since then, his work has been exhibited worldwide.

Bill Woodrow lives and works in London and Hampshire

Barry Flanagan (1941–2009) was a Welsh sculptor and printmaker, best known for his bronze statues of hares and other animals.

He studied architecture briefly and then sculpture at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts, and at St Martin's School of Art, London (1964–6). Alternating between abstract and figurative images and a variety of techniques, Flanagan maintained a consistently ironic attitude towards sculpture, an emphasis on the intrinsic qualities of the materials and an idiosyncratic lightness of touch that endowed the objects with a sense of vulnerability and impudence.

During the late 1960s Flanagan created temporary works of poured sand and draped cloth and his own upright biomorphic forms made of stitched, dyed hessian filled with plaster and sand. The popularity and distinctiveness of Flanagan's work greatly increased when he began making sculptures of hares. 

Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) was an English painter. She studied at Camberwell College of Art between 1945-50 and worked initially in London, later moving to Wales and then to Cornwall.

Ayres' early works are typically made with thin vinyl paint in a limited number of colours arranged in relatively simple forms, but later works in oil paint are more exuberant and very colourful, with a thick impasto being used. The titles of her paintings, such as Anthony and Cleopatra (1982) and A Midsummer Night (1990), are usually given after the painting is completed and do not directly describe the content of the painting, but rather are intended to resonate with the general mood of the work.

Ayres first exhibited with 'Young Contemporaries' in 1949 and with the London Group in 1951. Her first solo exhibition was at Gallery One, London in 1956. Subsequent solo shows were held regularly throughout Europe. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. 

Tim Head (born 1946) is a British artist. He studied fine art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1965 to 1969 and has from his student days used photography.

Initially he constructed site-specific installations by superimposing projected 35 mm slide images of figures and objects over their real-life counterparts. In the early 1980s he turned his attention in photographs to diverse imagery from the domestic interior and the world of commerce in order to speculate on the roles of technology and corporate power and on how their functions become accepted as an inevitable part of daily existence.

Head's work of the 1980s is distinguished by his innovative use of Cibachrome and Scanachrome processes on a mural-like scale, and by his new-found interest in painting. In 1987 Head won the 15th John Moores Painting Prize

Tim Head lives and works in London.

David Inshaw (born 1943) is a British artist who sprang to public attention in 1973 when his painting The Badminton Game was exhibited at the ICA Summer Studio exhibition in London.

He studied at Beckenham School of Art in 1959–63 and the Royal Academy Schools in 1963-66. In 1972 he formed the Broadheath Brotherhood with Graham and Ann Arnold. The three artists were joined by Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, and Graham and Annie Ovenden in 1975, when the group was renamed the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Inshaw left the group seven years later, in 1983.

Inshaw's paintings are held in many private and public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, the British Council, the Royal West of England Academy, Tate Britain and the Wiltshire Heritage Museum.

David Inshaw lives and works in London and Devizes.

Richard Wentworth (born 1947) is a British artist, curator and teacher. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, from 1965, and worked with Henry Moore in 1967. He also studied at the Royal College of Art, London (1968–70).

He has played a leading role in New British Sculpture since the end of the 1970s. His work, encircling the notion of objects and their use as part of our day-to-day experiences, has altered the traditional definition of sculpture as well as photography.

By transforming and manipulating industrial and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification.

Major solo presentations include Black Maria with Gruppe, Kings Cross (2013), Whitechapel Gallery (2010); 52nd Venice Biennale (2009); Tate Liverpool (2005); Artangel (2002); Bonner Kunstverein (1998); Stedelijk Museum (1994); Serpentine Gallery (1993)

Bruce McLean (born 1944) is a Scottish sculptor, performance artist and painter.

He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1961 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1966 at St Martin's School of Art, London. In 1965 he abandoned conventional studio production in favour of impermanent sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world.

McLean has gained international recognition for his paintings, ceramics, prints, work with film, theatre and books. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including Tate Gallery in London, The Modern Art Gallery in Vienna and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

In 1985, he won the John Moores Painting Prize.

Bruce Mclean lives and works in London.