Machiko Edmondson

Machiko Edmondson is a British painter whose birth year is given inconsistently across sources, most commonly as 1965 but occasionally as 1961, with no exact date confirmed in the public record. She began her training at Tama Art University in Tokyo, earning a BA in Fine Art and Cultural Studies in 1985. She later moved to London, where she completed a second BA in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts in 1992 and an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1995.

Her early professional visibility included work associated with musician Nick Cave in 1994 and, later, an image for Peter Gabriel's "Baby Man" project in 2003. She is also known professionally as Cyan Dee (also spelled Cyan D); the exact history and relationship between the two names is not fully documented in public sources. After several years based in New York, she returned to London, where she continues to live and work.

Edmondson's paintings are most often discussed through the lens of hyperrealism and what critics and gallerists have called "anti-portraits," extreme close-ups of faces that resist conventional portraiture and instead foreground the act of painting itself. Artsy has covered her work as a meditation on impossible standards of beauty, and gallery texts consistently frame her project as an examination of scrutiny and desire rather than likeness. Coverage of her practice remains modest relative to her exhibition history, and no verifiable, exact-wording quote from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Edmondson's primary current gallery relationship is with UNIX Gallery in New York, which presented her solo show "Everything in Equal Measure" in 2016. She has also shown with Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York and, in 2020, held a solo online exhibition, "Double Bluff," with Robert Berry Gallery in New York. Her paintings have also appeared in benefit auctions at major houses, including a 2009 sale for the Children's Cancer and Blood Foundation at Sotheby's New York and a 2014 sale, "Women on Women," at Christie's London.

Beyond those benefit sales, a confirmed public auction record is hard to pin down. The artist's own site states that a couple of her paintings have exceeded six figures in USD at Sotheby's and Christie's since 2007, but does not name the works, dates, or exact prices. One verifiable open-market lot, "Is this desire?" (2002), was offered at Dorotheum in Vienna on 20 September 2022 with an estimate of EUR 2,600 to 3,200; the dossier available does not confirm whether it sold or for how much. Two further works, "Scintillation" and "Diamond Sea," were listed at a Palm Beach New Year's Auction on 7 January 2026 with estimates of USD 10,000 to 20,000 each and marked sold, though the realized prices are not published. No single work can currently be documented as her all-time auction high.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Edmondson and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance should be checked directly with UNIX Gallery or the artist's studio, particularly given that she is also known by the separate name Cyan Dee. Her exhibition history spans respected London and New York galleries and museum group shows, including work associated with Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, but her public secondary market is thin and not fully documented, with even her reported birth year varying across standard art-market sources. Collectors should treat any single auction result, and any birth-year claim, with caution until confirmed against a primary source.