When Britain’s avant-garde weren’t so shouty

When the New York art dealer David Zwirner opened his London gallery in October 2012, observers expected him to make a statement of intent. Zwirner, who the magazine Art Review placed at number two in its 2013 Art Power 100 survey, is one of the art world’s most important three gallerists (the others are Larry Gagosian and Iwan Wirth). After a year of settling in, Zwirner made a newsworthy announcement: he had signed up the 27-year-old Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo. For a twenty-something, he had just had a remarkable set of auction results at Christie’s last June, with a work going for £253,875 against an estimate of £20,000 to £30,000. These results, along with the artist’s rough, informal paintings and his exotic cultural origins, led some observers to suggest that Murillo was the new Jean-Michel Basquiat. It seemed that Zwirner had got his statement London signing.

Signing the next new sensation is a tried and tested method for such prominent dealers to show that they are fully up to speed with art-world chatter — White Cube recently made a similar statement by exhibiting Eddie Peake, another hyper-fashionable young artist.