London Art Fair 2026
Stand E2
Business Design Centre, Islington, N1 0QH
21 - 25 January 2026 | Preview: 20 January 2026
For London Art Fair 2026, Zarastro Art brings together five artists whose practices ask a shared question: what shapes the way we see ourselves, one another, and reality?
Across painting and sculpture, the exhibition considers perception as something continually revised. This rewriting is instigated by emotion, recollection, bodily knowledge, and our relationship to the natural and mythic worlds.
Jo Chate, for instance, stages moments of suspension. Bodies, interiors, and terrains slip between states of being. Her dreamlike realms are filled with contemporary anxieties of our threatened environment. Each scene reveals how our understanding of existence is molded by personal sensibilities and power dynamics.
Rebecca Byrne, on the other hand, turns to landscape as a register of time. Through wilderness, water, and trees, memory persists even as it shifts. For Byrne, terrestrial ecosystems mirror interior topographies of dissonance and repair.
Intimacy becomes a site of resistance within Imogen Marsteller’s playful and vibrant portraits. Her figures confront socially constructed ideals with humor, beauty, and discomfort. She probes how identity crystallizes as mindsets are influenced by collective narratives.
Drawing upon the metaphysical, Shumaiya Khan’s mixed media work imagines perception as embodied. Employing archetypes, her abstract contoured lines bridge the spiritual and corporeal, offering release from today’s oppressive systems.
The ceramic sculptures of Danning Xie translate fleeting organic phenomena by combining cross-cultural and traditional techniques. Illuminating the porous boundary between body and environment through delicate textured surfaces, Xie challenges inherited paradigms of hierarchy.
When viewers encounter Zarastro Art’s stand, they enter a space for introspection. In this moment of pause, seeing is revealed not as neutral, but as deeply entangled with lived experience.
Featured Works
Jo Chate
Lost (2024)
Oil on linen
117 x 96.5 cm
£ 6,000
Jo Chate
Homage to Emilie Flöge (2024)
Oil on linen
169 x 138 cm
£ 10,000
Jo Chate
Limbo (2024)
Oil on linen
46 x 41 cm
£ 4,000
Jo Chate
Green Goddess (2022)
Oil on found framed canvas
54 x 46 cm
£ 4,000
Jo Chate
Metano (2024)
Oil on canvas
150 x 200 cm
£ 11,000
Rebecca Byrne
Pinch and Poke (2025)
Acrylic, gesso, pastel on paper
76 x 56 cm
£ 3,500
Rebecca Byrne
Dance as Wildly as You Will (2025)
Acrylic, gesso, pastel on paper
76 x 56 cm
£ 3,500
Rebecca Byrne
Proprioception (2025)
Acrylic, gesso and pastel on paper
76 x 56 cm
£ 3,500
Rebecca Byrne
Most of the time I think we’re ok (2025)
Watercolour, gesso, acrylic and pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
£ 3,500
Rebecca Byrne
They drank silently from Urdswell (2024)
Acrylic, gesso and pastel on paper
40 x 30 cm
£ 2,300
Rebecca Byrne
Spinning the Thread of Life (2024)
Acrylic, gesso and pastel on paper
40 x 30 cm
£ 2,300
Rebecca Byrne
Trespassers (2023)
Watercolour, gesso, acrylic, pastel on paper
26 x 36 cm
£ 1,800
Rebecca Byrne
Haptic Feedback (2024)
Acrylic, gesso and pastel on paper
40 x 30 cm
£ 2,300
Shumaiya Khan
The Third Branch of the Most Beloved Tree (2025)
Oil, salt, oil stick and charcoal on canvas
170 x 120 cm
£ 7,700
Shumaiya Khan
The Fifth Branch (2025)
Oil, salt and charcoal on canvas laminated with paper
60 x 70 cm
£ 3,500
Imogen Marsteller
We Are More Than The Victims They Make Us Out to Be (2022)
Graphite and oil on linen
90 x 80 cm
£ 4,000
Imogen Marsteller
Fish 'n' Tits (2025)
Oil on linen
35 × 30 cm
£ 1,500
Imogen Marsteller
Fish 'n' Nips (2025)
Oil on linen
35 × 30 cm
£ 1,500
Imogen Marsteller
Hunting for Warmth (2023)
Oil on linen
25 x 20 cm
£ 900
Imogen Marsteller
Roses are actually my favorite flower did you know? Maybe it is because they are beautiful despite the thorns (2024)
Oil on linen
20 x 20 cm
£ 750
Imogen Marsteller
Roses are actually my favorite flower did you know? Maybe it is because they are beautiful even as they wilt (2024)
Oil on linen
20 x 20 cm
£ 750
Danning Xie
Metamorphosis of the Red Cage No.3
Glazed stoneware, lacquer (Urushi)
31 x 31 x 33 cm
£ 2,750
Danning Xie
Metamorphosis of the Red Cage No.4
Glazed stoneware, lacquer (Urushi)
26 x 26 x 34 cm
£ 2,750
Artists
Jo Chate is a London-based painter whose practice merges feminist theory with environmental and spatial critique. She explores how built environments—shaped by patriarchal systems—influence how we move, see, and are seen, particularly in a female body.
Her process-led approach—combining physicality, reflection, and social commentary—yields paintings that are both personal and politically charged. The result is a practice that resists simple readings, drawing viewers into emotionally resonant spaces engaged with questions of embodiment.
Chate holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally, across both solo and group exhibitions.
Rebecca Byrne is an artist and curator working primarily in drawing and painting. Born in Chicago in 1968, she completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2012.
Color fills her imaginative natural landscapes. Her paintings and drawings balance abstraction and figuration, observation and creativity, life and death, guided by subtle, intuitive precision.
The artist works with pencil, colored pastels, oil, and acrylic to create expressive, tactile marks. Her ethereal scenes, populated with living and extinct plants, flowers, and trees, celebrate the richness of form and color in the natural world.
Byrne lives and works in London.
Imogen Marsteller holds a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (2023) and a Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Visual Arts and Art and Architectural History from Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Marsteller blends graphic and painterly styles to explore contemporary intimacy and feminist coming-of-age narratives. Influenced by Pop, Renaissance, Baroque art, and female artists, her work draws on personal and collective female experiences.
Shumaiya Khan is a London-based painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She holds an MA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School (2025), a BA (Hons) in Design from Goldsmiths, University of London (2013), and a Foundation in Art and Design from Leeds College of Art.
Shumaiya Khan explores body, nature, and time through alchemical materials such as salt, charcoal, and seed oil. Drawing on myth and mysticism, her immersive installations critique patriarchal structures while using salt to ground the work physically and create a direct, tactile connection with the viewer.
Danning Xie is a London-based ceramic artist. She completed her BFA at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and her MA at the University of the Arts London. She is the winner of the 2025 Signature Art Prize in the Sculpture category.
Xie creates hand-built sculptural ceramics that draw on Chinese ceramic history and global references. Her work centers on feminist inquiry, exploring women’s experiences and the body’s relationship to objects while challenging hierarchies between craft and sculpture.
Related Exhibitions
NextGen Collectors: Contemporary Art Collecting Today
In June 2026, Zarastro Art hosted NextGen Collectors: Contemporary Art Collecting Today, an evening discussion in London exploring how contemporary art is acquired, experienced, and valued. The event examined the changing relationship between collectors, artists, and artworks, and how ideas of identity, value, and cultural participation are shaping a new generation of collectors. Most people who own art did not
Whitney Biennial 2026: America Without Easy Answers
The Whitney Biennial has long asked what it means to be American. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, this year’s exhibition refuses easy answers. Instead, 56 artists explore grief, belonging, and interspecies kinship in New York’s most talked about and hotly debated exhibition. Several works give the Whitney Biennial 2026 its emotional weight. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena) is
Inside Refik Anadol’s DATALAND, the World’s First AI Art Museum
Imagine walking into a museum where artworks respond to your heartbeat and even the scents adapt to your body’s signals. That is the promise behind DATALAND, media artist Refik Anadol’s new Los Angeles institution, whose founders describe it as the world’s first museum dedicated to AI-driven art. Anadol founded DATALAND with his wife and longtime creative partner, painter and cultural
Rotterdam Museum Pays Tribute to Wim T. Schippers with Peanut Butter Floor
More than 800 pounds of peanut butter cover the floor of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, reviving one of Wim T. Schippers’ most iconic conceptual works. Staged after the artist’s death last month, the installation celebrates his lifelong commitment to redefining what art can be. Installed at the museum’s Depot, Pindakaasvloer (Peanut Butter Floor) consists of a 270 square
Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! Reassembles History
Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! examines the intertwined histories of China and Britain through an ambitious exhibition of sculpture, installation and new commissions. Set within a former industrial hall in Manchester, it explores empire, industrialisation, migration and censorship, revealing how history shapes today’s political and humanitarian realities. Button Up! is Ai Weiwei’s most expansive exhibition in northern England to date. Conceived
Manifesta 16: This Is Not a Church
Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial that uses each edition to engage with the social and historical realities of its host region, presents its sixteenth edition across Germany’s Ruhr Area, transforming disused postwar churches into spaces for art, dialogue, and community, exploring how history can unite. Manifesta 16 unfolds across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, and Bochum, with twelve former or underused churches