The Unknown Artist was started by two people who make things — Stacey Hames, a painter and muralist, and Mike Penfold, a woodturner. As working artists themselves, they knew exactly how hard it is to get your work in front of people who might actually want to buy it, without surrendering a huge chunk of the sale price to do so.

This gallery exists because art deserves a more direct path between the person who made it and the person who wants to live with it.

We're not anti-gallery. Bricks, mortar, staff, and a Soho postcode cost real money, and the galleries that carry those overheads earn their cut. But not every artist needs or wants that world — and not every buyer wants to navigate it. Some work is too personal, too particular, too genuinely strange for the white-walled mainstream. That's exactly the work we want to show.

The artists here aren't unknown because they lack talent. They're unknown because the system for getting noticed is slow, expensive, and not built for everyone. We're impatient with that. If the work is good and the story is real, it belongs somewhere people can find it.

Every piece in this gallery is sold direct. No middleman, no mystery markup — just the work, the artist, and you.

Browse the gallery. Meet the artists. And if something stops you in your tracks, that's probably the point.