Sahara Longe

Sahara Longe was born in London in 1994 to an English father and a Sierra Leonean mother. She attended Heathfield School in Berkshire and briefly enrolled at the University of Bristol to study art history, withdrawing after less than a year. She then trained for four years at Charles H. Cecil Studios, a classical atelier in Florence, learning traditional drawing and painting technique through roughly 2014 to 2018, a grounding that shows in the controlled, flattened surfaces of her later figurative work.

Longe began showing publicly in London group exhibitions from 2018 to 2019, and her profile grew through appearances with Ed Cross at fairs including 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair and through a 2021 residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, selected through The Great Women Artists program. That year she also showed in the group exhibition IRL (In Real Life) at Timothy Taylor in London, the gallery that now represents her. In 2023 she held New Shapes, her first solo exhibition in the UK and with Timothy Taylor, and the same year she was commissioned by King Charles III to contribute a portrait to the exhibition Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation, marking the 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush. In 2024 she held Sugar, her first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. In 2025 she opened The Other Side of the Mountain at Arnolfini in Bristol, her first institutional solo exhibition. She continues to live and work in London.

Longe has drawn attention for a style that fuses the classical technique of her Florentine training with flattened, semi-abstract figures, a combination critics and curators have linked to her stated interest in portraiture as a record of everyday Black British life. Vogue profiled the artist around her Timothy Taylor exhibition, positioning her among the notable young figurative painters to emerge from London in the early 2020s. Her inclusion in Artsy's 2022 Vanguard list of artists to watch, alongside her Royal Collection Trust commission and her first institutional solo exhibition at Arnolfini in 2025, reflect a critical and institutional consensus that has formed quickly around her practice even as her market history remains short.

Longe's auction market is very young, having formed only since 2021, and remains small in volume, with only a small number of works recorded at auction to date. Her current auction high is Party Scene, which sold for GBP 176,400 at Christie's London in the house's 20th/21st century evening sale in October 2023, well above its estimate and a new high for the artist at the time. It surpassed an earlier result for Self-Portrait, which had sold at Christie's London for GBP 113,400 on 28 June 2023. Both sales point to strong buyer demand relative to estimate, though the total number of public sales is still too small to establish a stable price trend.

Longe is an early-career artist. There is no catalogue raisonne, and with her market only a few years old, provenance and direct verification through her representing gallery, Timothy Taylor, matter more than they would for an artist with a longer sales record. Her auction results to date are few in number and have exceeded estimate by a wide margin, which is encouraging for demand but also means any single result should be read with caution rather than treated as an established trend. Collectors should weigh her strong and fast-moving institutional and gallery support against the reality that her secondary market is still being built.