Francesca Mollett

Francesca Mollett was born in Bristol, England, in 1991. She trained at Wimbledon College of Arts, London, completing a BA in Fine Art Painting in 2014, then spent a year on The Drawing Year program at the Royal Drawing School, London, in 2015, before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2020. She received the Aidan Threlfall Award in 2020. She lives and works in London.

Her paintings are abstract, built from layered, atmospheric passages of color that critics and gallery texts consistently describe as responding to specific places, light, and natural or botanical subject matter, evident in titles such as Two Thistles, Sancreed, and Cadence. Her exhibition history moved quickly after her MA: a solo show at Informality Gallery in 2021, followed in 2022 by solo exhibitions at Baert Gallery in Los Angeles and Taymour Grahne Projects in London. In 2023 she held three solo exhibitions in one year, at Pond Society in Shanghai, GRIMM in Amsterdam, and Micki Meng (Friends Indeed) in San Francisco, and was included in the group show Present Tense at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in early 2024. She held a solo show, Corso, at GRIMM's New York gallery in 2024, her first solo exhibition with Modern Art in London, Annual Honesty, in 2025, and a further solo show, Buried Shadow, at GRIMM New York in 2026.

Coverage of Mollett has centered less on formal art criticism to date and more on market and gallery commentary tracking her rapid rise, most visibly a 2024 feature in The Art Newspaper examining the sudden popularity of her paintings at auction and the multiple estimate-beating results that followed her first appearance on the market in December 2022. Institutional attention has run in parallel: her work is reported to be held by institutions and foundations including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, He Art Museum in Foshan, and the Green Family Art Foundation, though a comprehensive, independently verified list of her institutional holdings was not available for this profile, and she was included in the 2024 group exhibition Present Tense at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. No verified, exact critic quotation from a major outlet could be sourced for this profile.

Mollett's work first appeared at auction in December 2022, and by mid-2024 nine of her works had come to auction, according to The Art Newspaper's reporting drawn from the Artnet Price Database. Her auction record is Two Thistles (2021), which sold for GBP 254,000 with fees at Phillips London, reported as 13 October 2023, about seven times its GBP 35,000 high estimate. Her next-highest recorded results, per Phillips, are Sancreed (USD 139,700) and Cadence (HKD 952,500); exact sale dates for these have not been independently confirmed. No result has surpassed the Two Thistles record as of mid-2026.

Mollett's auction market is new, having existed for less than four years and comprising a small number of sales, so results have swung sharply against estimate and should not be read as a stable price trend. She has no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist at this career stage, and works are best verified through her representing galleries, GRIMM and Modern Art, or through the other galleries that have organized her solo exhibitions. Her institutional collection base is unusually broad for her age and career length, which is a meaningful signal of curatorial support, but collectors should weigh that against the limited depth of her public auction record.