Maria Farrar

Maria Farrar was born in the Philippines in 1988 and was raised in Shimonoseki, Japan, until age fifteen, before moving to the United Kingdom. She trained through an Art Foundation at Lincoln College of Art in 2009, a BFA in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2012, and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 2016.

During her time at the Slade she received the Gwen John Scholarship in 2014 and, in 2016, both the Melville Nettleship Prize and a Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship that supported a residency at the British School at Rome. Her early solo exhibitions included Eaves Deep at mother's tankstation, London, in 2018. That same year her work appeared in the group exhibition Known Unknowns at Saatchi Gallery, London; her work is also held in the Saatchi Gallery Collection.

From 2019 onward her exhibition history centers on Ota Fine Arts, with solo presentations in Tokyo and Singapore (Too late to turn back now, 2019), Shanghai (Spring, 2020 to 2021), and Tokyo again (Overseas, 2021). In 2021 her work was also included in the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Her paintings, often built around food, childhood, and family, draw recurring imagery from the three places she has lived: the Philippines, Japan, and Britain. She continues to live and work in London.

No exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. What is documented is a steady accumulation of curatorial endorsement: inclusion in Known Unknowns at Saatchi Gallery in 2018, the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition in 2021, and a consistent solo and group program with Ota Fine Arts running through 2026. Press and gallery texts consistently describe her paintings as personal and narrative, built from food, domestic scenes, and childhood memory that trace her movement between the Philippines, Japan, and Britain.

Maria Farrar's market is still small and primarily gallery driven, through Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore. Her highest publicly documented auction price is for Sachertorte, which sold for HKD 882,000 (approximately USD 113,000) at Sotheby's in Hong Kong on 30 March 2025. Other lots at Phillips have sold for HKD 403,200 (Birthday) and HKD 327,600 (Brioche con Gelato), with exact sale dates not confirmed on the public record, reflecting an early-career auction market with limited volume and no repeat-sale history to draw a price trend from.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Maria Farrar, and authentication runs through her representing gallery, Ota Fine Arts, rather than through an independent archive or committee. Her auction record is limited to a small number of modestly priced lots, so any single result should be read as an early data point rather than a stable trend line. Her strongest signal of durability at this stage is institutional: work held by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the UK Government Art Collection, and several Asian and European collections, alongside a consistent primary-market presence through one gallery.