David Kim Whittaker

David Kim Whittaker was born in 1964 in Cornwall, England, and has lived and worked there for most of his career, with some sources associating him more specifically with the Redruth and Newquay areas of the county. He is self-taught, with no formal art school training or fine-art degree documented in public sources. His paintings return repeatedly to the human head, treated less as portraiture than as a site of psychological and metaphysical inquiry.

Whittaker is reported to have joined the Newlyn Society of Artists in 2009, though this membership is not independently corroborated beyond a single regional source. According to The Independent (2015), he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria around that time, and the Independent and South China Morning Post (2019) have described him as a transgender artist; galleries representing his work have connected this personal history directly to the psychological intensity of his paintings. In 2011 he won First Prize, the Towry Award, at the National Open Art Competition, and his winning painting was reportedly exhibited the following year at the National Gallery in London.

His work has since been shown internationally, including a solo exhibition at Fondazione Mudima in Milan in 2017. He is represented by Opera Gallery, which has staged solo presentations of his work in London, Hong Kong, and Seoul, and by the Cornwall-based gallery Anima Mundi. Recent solo shows include Towards Miracle at Gallery Bisunjae in Seoul in 2023 and A Compendium at Opera Gallery Seoul in 2024. He continues to live and work in Cornwall.

Independent critical writing on Whittaker in major outlets is limited, and no exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed for this profile. Coverage to date comes mostly from the galleries that represent him and from feature journalism, including The Independent (2015) and South China Morning Post (2019), both of which frame his work through his own account of gender dysphoria and his self-taught path into painting. Regional coverage of his recent Seoul exhibitions has focused on the recurring head motif as an expression of psychological and metaphysical states rather than conventional portraiture. The dominant critical theme, consistent across gallery and press accounts, is that his biography and his imagery are treated as inseparable.

Whittaker's secondary market is thin. Phillips' own artist-page listing shows Portrait for Human Presence VII (The Displaced I) selling for GBP 56,250 at Phillips, London (New Now, 8 March 2018), his best-documented result there, with Vow To Increase close behind at GBP 52,920 (New Now, London, 9 March 2017). A Cornwall gallery site separately cites a higher GBP 81,250 Phillips sale for a work titled Self Portrait Four and a Christie's Paris sale of GBP 46,761 for Boys Ascends, but neither figure could be matched to Phillips' or Christie's own listings, so they are treated here as unverified rather than as the confirmed record. Public auction activity for the artist appears limited overall, and his primary market runs mainly through Opera Gallery and Anima Mundi rather than through the salesroom.

Whittaker's auction record is short and, on the highest figure, disputed: Phillips' own listing confirms two results, from 2017 and 2018, while a higher-priced sale reported only by a gallery website could not be independently verified. Any auction-based read of his market should be treated as an early, incomplete data point rather than a settled trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, and no major public museum collection holding his work has been identified in available sources, so provenance and authenticity are best confirmed directly through his representing galleries, Opera Gallery and Anima Mundi. His market is presently gallery-led, built through international solo exhibitions in London, Milan, Hong Kong, and Seoul, which is a different risk profile than an artist with deep auction liquidity.