Over the last year, I’ve witnessed momentum growing in the Midlands. As well as drawing, painting or printing solo in their studios, Birmingham artists are forming new collectives like MIAC or UASB, participating in art trails and open studio weekends, co-curating group shows in spaces such as The Hive, and selling directly to collectors through their own channels.
It’s an exciting, galvanising time for creativity in the Second City, which has historically been home to many famous artists, from Edward Burne-Jones to Emmy Bridgwater. Today, their spirit of experimentation lives on, so if you’re seeking new art for your home, or want to invest in emerging talent, here are 10 Birmingham artists to watch.
1. Tara Harris
An evocative painter, Tara Harris conjures up otherworldly landscapes and seascapes which are lined with memories. Drawing on her background in printmaking, she creates intricate, layered surfaces rich in pattern and texture, from which uncanny structures arise. Influenced by the fluidity and harmony of traditional Korean art, she blends meticulous detail with intuitive mark-making to express memory, grief, loss, love and healing.
The artist’s process is deeply personal and cathartic: each gesture becomes an act of reflection and remembrance. Working instinctively, often late into the night, she allows each image to emerge organically. Her compositions also invite viewers on their own inner journeys through emotional terrains, where strange doors open. A member of two Midlands art collectives, MIAC and UASB, she held her first solo show ‘Lands Beyond’ at Nook Gallery in 2025 and was recently featured in Women Artists on the Rise.
Instagram: @tara_harris_art
Website: www.taraharrisart.co.uk
2. Paul Newman
Rooted in the tradition of Birmingham’s famous surrealist artists, Paul Newman works across painting, collage, performance and sculpture. With pictorial interests ranging from historical landscape painting to local urban scenery and horror films, he creates compelling narratives in which giant beetles, mysterious insects and other movie-based monsters run wild. Amid psychological ruins and haunted houses, nostalgia, fiction and memory converge with ghostly effect.
With a Fine Art MA (Distinction) from Birmingham School of Art, Newman is a member of Contemporary British Painting and is a lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University. He has work in permanent collections, including at the New Art Gallery Walsall and in China. Exhibiting widely, he’s had group and solo shows at Midlands Arts Centre, the Hive and Stryx Gallery, where selected paintings are for sale.
Website: paul-newman.net/
Instagram: @paulhnewman
3. Shaun Morris
Born and raised in the Black Country, Shaun Morris paints post-industrial landscapes layered with personal memories, shared stories and collective histories. With echoes of George Shaw, he pictures the boundary edges of Midlands towns and cities, inviting viewers to wander into the liminal spaces of a supermarket carpark, local bus stop, or common woodlands on the edge of housing estates where he grew up. Painted with fluid brushstrokes, these scenes carry a magical realism, which also reflects his interest in the paintings of Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson and Matthew Krishanu.
With an MA in Fine Art, Painting, from Norwich School of Art And Design, Morris has exhibited widely in London and the Midlands, and has work in private and public collections in the UK and overseas. Currently a lecturer in Fine Art in Birmingham, Morris was recently seen as a contestant on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year.
Instagram @shaun_morris_paintings
Website: www.shaunmorrispaintings.com/
4. Anisa Mosaiebiniya
Absorbed in their work, women sew, read, think, and sit quietly in the paintings of Birmingham-based Iranian painter Anisa Mosaiebiniya. Framing the beauty of introspective moments, Mosaiebiniya’s practice has been shaped by her lived experience across continents, where she has connected with women from diverse cultures, whose stories have often been silenced by judgment. In her painterly narrative compositions, she reveals how identity is not one simple story. Rather, as she says, “we are made of many parts. We belong to many moments. I want my paintings to share some of these layers.”
The artist also channels her personal journey of self-discovery, empowerment and resilience into still life photographs, which capture serenity in everyday domestic life, often unobserved behind closed doors. She has exhibited at Eastside Projects, Solihull’s Courtyard Gallery, the RBSA Gallery and Stryx Gallery, where she is a studio holder. Finding a home among West Midlands artists, she’s recently joined MIAC.
Instagram: @anisaastudio
Website: www.anisams.co.uk
5. Paul Lemmon
Birmingham-born artist, Paul Lemmon forages through cyberspace, collecting and deconstructing screenshots of digital images and film footage. “Just like in the natural world where material is broken down and grows into new things, I’m following that process by breaking down what I find in the digital forest and transforming it, growing it into a physical thing, a handmade painting”, he explains.
His impressionistic, pixellated oil paintings take viewers through the screen to challenge ideas of reality in a post-truth age. Famous faces, birds and abstract shapes shimmer, converge and crackle in collaged paintings which offer windows into shape-shifting worlds. Recently, Lemmon has completed major commissions for Coventry Biennial and Surreal Solihull, while continuing to exhibit widely. Represented by Forward Gallery, Birmingham and RVP Gallery, London, his paintings are for sale in both spaces and online.
Instagram: @paullemmon_art
Website: www.paullemmon.com/
6. Sophie Slade
Birmingham-based Sophie Slade subverts all expectations of textile art. Combining traditional tapestry with free warp weaving and other techniques, she makes highly textural pieces. Her materials can be unconventional and she re-purposes them by combining processes or applying them in new ways. Fascinated by marine life and the alien qualities of biological life forms, her work explores the relationship between the organic world, human attempts to synthesise it, and the formations of organisms at a cellular level.
Slade graduated with a BA in Three-dimensional Design, specialising in glass and tapestry, but pursued a path in heritage. She returned to tapestry in 2021, via the Foundation Diploma at West Dean College. Since then, she’s been focusing on developing her work for exhibitions, including ‘Paper’ at Nook Gallery. She’s part of MIAC, taking part in its first show ‘Belongings’ at the Core Theatre Gallery in Solihull, and has recently been selected for the British Tapestry Group’s 20th anniversary show which will tour the UK in 2025/26.
Instagram: @sophiesladetapestry
7. Suminder Virk
As a painter, Suminder Virk draws inspiration from Brutalist architecture’s sharp angles, clean straight lines and repetitive geometric patterns. Drawing on the motifs of buildings, while adopting a warm palette of saturated colours, she explores personal memories, nostalgia and connections to her Indian heritage. Through her work she addresses formalist concerns such as colour, line, space and composition, combined with a deep love for paint and its possibilities, materiality and physicality.
She has developed a new technique of applying fine yet textured lines of oil paint, echoing the traditional methods of Henna tattooing, which carry familial significance for her. She is also drawn to the light and shadow of the urban environment, and on canvas seeks to “create spaces which may or may not have any recognisable elements of the tangible world.” She has exhibited across the UK and India and is represented by the Gallery Runjeet Singh Arts.
Instagram: @sumindervirkartist
Website: sumindervirk.com/
8. Hasret Brown
British Turkish artist Hasret Brown is deeply influenced by the rich tapestry of geometric patterns from Ottoman and Anatolian Seljuk art and architecture, and Turkish decorative arts. Adopting centuries-old craftsmanship, she re-constructs geometries with a traditional compass and straight edge. Using her own handmade paints and gold leaf, she draws a bridge between traditional and contemporary practices to honour the heritage of her ancestors. As she says, “each piece is a dialogue between the past and the present.”
Her shimmering compositions appear as an unfolding cosmos of patterns and constellations, which reflect her multicultural identity, journeys and diverse influences including David Bowie’s persona and music. Through her work, Brown finds the freedom to explore the “suppressed aspects” of herself from youth “due to cultural restrictions.” She invites viewers into a space where cultures intersect with beauty and harmony. With a studio in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, she is a member of MIAC, exhibiting in the Midlands and across the UK, where she also runs workshops. In 2017 she was a finalist at the British Muslim Awards for her contributions in the Arts and Culture Awareness category.
Instagram: @hasretbrown_art
Website: www.hasretbrown.com/
9. Emma Woolley
Themes of identity, memory, and the human condition surface in the dynamic portraits of Emma Louise Woolley. Born in Birmingham, she has cultivated a distinctive artistic voice through her exploration of various media, although she’s best known for paintings. Influenced by artists such as Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville, she interrogates the connection between the sitter and artist, interpreting the deeper soul and psychology of each subject she depicts. With a palette of corals and blues, and guided by pure instinct, she creates a sense of wonder in each expressively painted portrait, creating what she calls “a space to feel things”.
A member of UASB and committed to working with other Birmingham and West Midlands artists, Woolley has exhibited at Nook Gallery, MAC and Moseley Exchange. She holds a BA Hons degree in Graphic Design and Illustration at Coventry School of Art, as well as a Fine Arts BA Hons degree from Wolverhampton School of Art. Outside her studio, Woolley works as a Senior Art Director, running a design studio at the Custard Factory in Digbeth, Birmingham. She has recently been shortlisted for the WIA Paula Rego Prize.
Instagram: @emma_woolley_artist
Website: www.emma-woolley.co.uk/
10. Sam Weeks
Birmingham-based abstract painter Sam Weeks gained her degree in Fine Art at Birmingham City University in 2001. Since then, she has had a career in education and maintained an art practice, becoming a full time artist in 2022. Working in an instinctive and intuitive manner, she finds inspiration by following what she terms “the trail of breadcrumbs into the unknown.” This explorative, flow-state quality is mapped across the surface of her glaze-layered, textured paintings in which abstract gestures coexist with geometric shapes and natural motifs, reflecting the inner push and pull of opposing forces, and a search for resolution between chaos and harmony.
A founding member of UASB, Weeks has gallery representation from Seventh Circle Art & Aesthetics, and has recently exhibited at nook Art Gallery, The Empire Apartments (Bath), Artsfest UASB group exhibition and Art in the Heath. Weeks’ work is available from Seventh Circle Gallery, at various art fairs, and directly from her studio in Kings Heath, at in-person events such as Birmingham Open Studios, and through her website. She also has an upcoming solo show in August 2025 at Malvern Library.
Instagram: @samweeksartist
Website: samweeksartist.com/
