Dexter Dalwood

Dexter Dalwood was born in Bristol, England, in 1960. By his own account he left school after a single year of A-levels, worked in a foundry, and took evening art classes before enrolling at what is now Central Saint Martins, where he earned a BA in 1985. He went on to complete an MA at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1990.

Dalwood's paintings are built from collage: fragments of interiors, art-historical quotations, and news and celebrity imagery are assembled and then painted, producing rooms and settings, a hijacked plane's cabin, a politician's retreat, that the artist never actually saw. The work reads as a form of contemporary history painting, using invented space to think about power, memory, and mediated culture. He showed in Saatchi Gallery's "New Neurotic Realism" survey in 1999 and in the 2002 Sydney Biennale, and his work has since appeared in thematic group exhibitions including "Fighting History" at Tate Britain (2015), "Age of Terror: Art since 9/11" at the Imperial War Museum (2016), and the touring "Michael Jackson: On the Wall" (2018 to 2019).

A 2010 retrospective, organized by Tate St Ives and traveling to CAC Malaga and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, led to his shortlisting for the Turner Prize that year. He was appointed Professor of Art and Design at Bath Spa University in 2012 and continues to hold a senior academic post there, described in current university and gallery materials as Research Professor of Fine Art. He has shown over the years with Gagosian, Galerie Hubert Winter, Nolan Judin, and David Risley Gallery. Lisson Gallery opened its first solo exhibition with him in London in September 2024, alongside a longstanding relationship with Simon Lee Gallery. Dalwood took up a residency in Oaxaca in 2017 and has lived and worked full time in Mexico City since around 2022, following earlier years based in London. In 2025 he co-curated an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, and continues to exhibit with Lisson Gallery and with Galerie Nordenhake in Mexico City.

Critical attention to Dalwood has centered on his revival of history painting through collage, treating invented interiors and imagined scenes as a way to hold political and cultural memory inside abstraction's near neighbor, figuration. His inclusion in Tate Britain's "Fighting History" (2015) placed him explicitly within a lineage of British painters responding to conflict and power, while "Age of Terror" at the Imperial War Museum (2016) read his work against post-9/11 anxiety. The 2010 Tate St Ives retrospective and subsequent Turner Prize shortlisting marked the high point of formal critical recognition, and later academic and curatorial roles, including a professorship at Bath Spa University and a 2025 co-curatorial project at the National Gallery, have reinforced his standing as both practitioner and thinker about how exhibitions and art history get made.

Dalwood's market runs primarily through the primary gallery system rather than the auction room. His first solo exhibition with Lisson Gallery, London, opened in September 2024, alongside a longstanding relationship with Simon Lee Gallery, and together these remain the clearest current channels for acquiring new work. His paintings have also appeared at auction houses including Sotheby's, Phillips, and Bonhams, but public price data for the artist remains sparse. Market trackers such as MutualArt identify a painting titled Uncle Tom's Cabin as the artist's highest recorded price in 2025, but no source consulted discloses the hammer price, currency, auction house, or exact sale date, so no auction record can be stated with confidence.

No catalogue raisonne for Dalwood has been identified, and there is no certificate-of-authenticity program; Lisson Gallery, his primary representative since 2024 alongside a longstanding relationship with Simon Lee Gallery, is the most direct route for authentication and provenance questions. His auction footprint is thin and unevenly documented, with no publicly confirmed price, house, or date for a top result, so collectors should treat any reported figure with care rather than as an established benchmark. The stronger signal for durability is institutional: Dalwood's work sits in the collections of Tate, the Saatchi Gallery, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, alongside a sustained record of museum group shows and a Turner Prize shortlisting.