Andrew Cranston

Andrew Cranston was born on 22 July 1969 in Hawick, in the Scottish Borders. He studied art in three stages: a Diploma in Art and Design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1989 to 1990, a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen from 1990 to 1993, and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London from 1994 to 1996, where his teachers included Peter Doig. After completing his MA he returned to Gray's School of Art as a lecturer in painting, a post he held from 1997 to 2017.

His early solo exhibitions took place in Edinburgh, Berlin, and London through the 2000s and early 2010s, including shows at the Royal Scottish Academy, Hamish Morrison Galerie in Berlin, and Rob Tufnell in London. His relationship with Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh deepened through the 2010s with solo exhibitions including Andrew Cranston: Paintings from a Room in 2016 and But the dream had no sound in 2018. He was elected RSA (Elect) of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2009 and received the Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting in 2014.

His profile expanded internationally from the early 2020s, with solo exhibitions at Karma in New York in 2021, at Modern Art in London in 2022, and a major survey, What made you stop here?, at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2023 to 2024. Further solo shows followed at Karma in Los Angeles and Modern Art in Paris in 2024, and a two-person exhibition pairing his work with Winifred Nicholson's toured the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney and the Holburne Museum in Bath across 2025 and 2026. He lives and works in Glasgow.

Cranston's paintings are typically discussed in terms of memory and narrative rather than pure formal abstraction: small scale, book like surfaces built up in layers, and scenes that read as remembered or half invented rather than observed directly. Institutional writing on the artist, including the National Galleries of Scotland and The Hepworth Wakefield, has described his paintings as conjuring dream-like, liminal domestic spaces, while his gallery Karma has noted the darkly humorous quality of his compositions and their kinship with the interiors of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. His steady progression from Scottish regional galleries through Ingleby, to Modern Art in London and Paris, to Karma in New York and Los Angeles, and into museum surveys such as the 2023 to 2024 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, has been widely read within the trade as evidence of a painter moving from a strong regional reputation to broader international standing.

Cranston's auction market is small in volume but has risen sharply. His current auction record is Meditation in a tenement (2023), which sold for GBP 83,800 (about USD 110,500) at Phillips London on 26 June 2026. That result surpassed his previous record, Salad Days (2020), which sold for about USD 81,000 at Christie's London on 9 March 2024. Most other recorded lots have sold well below these two prices, and his broader auction history, tracked since around 2020, spans a wide range from modest print level prices to these two headline results.

Cranston's market remains thin by auction lot count, so headline results like the 2026 Phillips sale should be read as evidence of rising demand rather than a stable, liquid trading history. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification depend on his three representing galleries and their exhibition and sales records. His institutional footing, including recent solo exhibitions at Karma, Modern Art, and The Hepworth Wakefield, is a stronger signal of long term durability than the auction history alone.