From the Zabludowicz Collection: groundbreaking works by Hirst, Nara, Wylie, Johnson, Guston and more

Between 2007 and 2023, a typical weekday morning for Anita Zabludowicz entailed breakfast with her family, followed by a short trip to Chalk Farm in north London, where her not-for-profit project space was located. This one-time Methodist chapel showcased the trailblazing art collection that Anita and her husband Poju had started in 1994.

Today, that collection comprises more than 5,000 works, and highlights from it are being offered across two sales at Christie’s under the title Beyond Ordinary — Then. Now. Next. Works from the Zabludowicz Collection. The live auction takes place at Christie’s in London on 25 June 2026, alongside an online sale, which is live for bidding until 30 June.

The Zabludowicz Collection was founded at a transformative moment for London’s art scene, and soon became known for its support of contemporary British artists such as Damien Hirst and Hurvin Anderson, as well as emerging international artists who, in several cases, have since become big names — the likes of Albert Oehlen, Yoshitomo Nara and Beatriz Milhazes.

The works in Beyond Ordinary are almost entirely fresh to the auction market, many having been acquired shortly after their creation. ‘What began as a personal passion became a lifelong commitment — a way of living shaped by curiosity, instinct and an openness to experimentation,’ says Anita Zabludowicz. ‘The collection grew dynamically and without fixed boundaries: it was never about following a single narrative, but about embracing discovery, dialogue and risk.’

Artists associated with the Pictures Generation — such as Richard Prince and John Baldessari — figure prominently, as do artists with a concern for social justice, such as Mark Bradford and Lubaina Himid.

In the collection’s early days, Anita (who had studied art in her home city of Newcastle) and Poju (a Finnish-born businessman and philanthropist) fostered important links with curators, dealers and gallerists. They began buying work across a variety of genres, from painting to video art.

In 2007, looking to share their passion with the public, they opened the project space at 176 Prince of Wales Road. This became a hub of creative ambition, where artists and curators were invited to work on exhibitions related to the collection, as well as on site-specific projects and workshops. Over 16 years, more than 250,000 visitors passed through the venue’s doors, free of charge.

The couple’s contribution to contemporary art extended to other parts of London. They were founder benefactors of Tate Modern when it opened in 2000, and lent financial support to institutions such as the Whitechapel Gallery and Chisenhale Gallery. Anita was also a trustee of Camden Art Centre for 15 years, and was awarded an OBE in 2015 for her services to the arts.

Having closed the project space three years ago, they are offering the works at Christie’s in a spirit of renewal. Now directed by their daughter Tiffany, the Zabludowicz Collection remains oriented towards the future — shifting its focus to the next generation who will shape the course of contemporary art. The sales mark a telling moment in its evolution, creating space for new acquisitions and future initiatives.

Below, we look at five highlights from Beyond Ordinary, which serve as testament to what Anita calls 32 years’ worth of ‘discovering a world that could be expressed through art’.

Damien Hirst, I Love you, 1994-95

The intersection of life, death and art lies at the core of Damien Hirst’s practice, evident in his works featuring skulls, medicine cabinets and animals preserved in formaldehyde. He has consistently posited art as an antidote to mortality.

Hirst’s stunning butterfly paintings can also be considered in this vein, an early example of which — I Love You — appears in Beyond Ordinary. A kaleidoscope of tiny butterflies lie on a square canvas that has been painted red. They appear suspended in motion, their wings glinting like diamonds.

I Love You is one of a suite of 12 butterfly paintings for which Hirst was awarded the prestigious Prix Eliette von Karajan in Austria in 1995 — shortly before he won the Turner Prize in his home country.

These works are marked by a near-Minimalist purity, elegance and sense of spatial harmony, the rich red monochrome of I Love You calling to mind the colour fields of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Yoshitomo Nara, Your Dog, 2002

Towering above the viewer, this monumental canine sculpture — in glossy white fibreglass with a cheerful red nose — suggests a world seen through the eyes of a child. A beloved work by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, Your Dog is instantly engaging. As one spends a little time in its presence, however, it elicits a complex reaction.

Now in his mid-sixties, Nara is best known for his paintings of solitary children with large heads, captured against a sparse background. The persistence into adulthood of our childhood memories and emotions is a constant theme in his work, and Your Dog is no exception.

The creature has floppy ears, closed eyes and a serene smile — stylised features that make it seem vulnerable and sweet, even as it dwarfs us. By offering a child’s world-view through an adult lens, Nara captures the tensions between innocence and experience, between imagination and reality, which every one of us has felt.

Rose Wylie, Sailing Boat, 2015

Now 91, Rose Wylie attended art school in the 1950s, before putting her career on long-term hold to raise a family. She returned to painting in the 1980s, and has experienced a surge of critical interest in her work over the past decade.

Celebrated for her eclectic visual language, staged in vivid theatrical tableaux, Wylie was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Sailing Boat belongs to a series of works dedicated to the Mayflower voyage: the journey that transported the Pilgrim Fathers from England to America in 1620. Rather than seeking to represent historical fact, Wylie instead paints her memories of encountering the past: she based the work on recollections of a flat-pack model of the Mayflower that she received for Christmas as a child. The boat assumes an almost anthropomorphic quality, crowned with a humorous figurehead.

Wylie insists that ‘it’s not history’ per se that interests her, so much as the layers of meaning that historical events accrue over time.

Rashid Johnson, Untitled Broken Crowd, 2021

The son of an artist and a scholar of African-American history, Rashid Johnson was born on the outskirts of Chicago in 1977. He started out as a photographer, but has since described his practice as ‘post-medium’. Which is to say, he moves freely between media — in the case of Untitled Broken Crowd, doing so in a single work.

This monumental mosaic piece is part sculpture, part painting. It consists of 28 rectangular faces emerging from a melee of ceramic and mirrored tiles. With hollow eyes and wide-open mouths, they seem agitated. Streaks of colour play across the work’s surface, which is overlaid with spray-paint, oil stick, black soap and wax.

The composition is charged with the energy and chaos of contemporary life, suggesting identities — both collective and individual — in flux. It is part of a series that Johnson calls ‘Broken Men’, other examples of which are held in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The artist was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the latter in 2025-26.

Philip Guston, Mirror Head, 1977

Having made his name as an abstractionist in the New York School in the 1950s, Philip Guston shifted dramatically towards the end of the following decade, deciding to paint figuratively.

Almost three metres in width, Mirror Head is a large and powerful manifestation of that shift. It depicts the artist’s wife, Musa McKim — the back of her head, to be precise. She appears to be facing her hazy reflection in a mirror.

By the late 1970s, many of Guston’s paintings were visions of Musa and himself. Musa suffered a series of strokes in the year that Mirror Head was painted, and the work might be seen as an expression of his love for her (witness the shining highlights and deep shadows that texture her hair, which is boldly worked in strokes of red, mauve and black).

With the head turned away, and its reflection dissolving from view, the painting seems also to be an intimation of mortality.

Beyond Ordinary — Then. Now. Next. Works from the Zabludowicz Collection is on view until 24 June 2026 at Christie’s in London, alongside the online sale (live for bidding until 30 June)