Richard Saltoun Gallery

About the Gallery
Richard Saltoun Gallery was established in 2012 and is currently based on Dover Street in Mayfair, London. The gallery supports contemporary artists, with a special emphasis on Feminist, Conceptual and Performance artists from the 1960s onwards. The gallery is guided by its focus on rediscovering the work of important yet underrepresented artists. Active on both the primary and secondary market, Richard Saltoun Gallery has established a leading reputation for promoting and exhibiting the work of female artists, including Helena Almeida, Eleanor Antin, Renate Bertlmann, Lili Dujourie, Rose English, Valie Export, Friedl Kubelka, Gina Pane, Penny Slinger, Annegret Soltau and Greta Schödl, amongst others. Additionally, the gallery supports and exhibits artists who have contributed to the fields of Conceptual and Performance art, including Victor Burgin, Bob Law, John Hilliard, (Dom) Sylvester Houédard, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Ulay, Shelagh Wakely, Marie Yates and more. Until recently, many of these innovative and experimental artists were largely ignored by the broader international art world.

The gallery is dedicated to preserving the legacy of artists through its representation of artist estates, including Helen Chadwick, Henri Chopin, David Hall, Ed Herring, Nigel Henderson, Alexis Hunter, Bob Law, Bice Lazzari, Tony Morgan, Jo Spence, and Shelagh Wakely.

About the Presentation
At Independent 20th Century, Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a duo presentation of Baya (1931–1998) and Juliana Seraphim (1934–2005), two pioneering modernists who placed the female gaze at the heart of their work. Though working in different regions—North Africa and the Middle East—both developed highly individual visual languages that challenged dominant portrayals of women in art, offering instead images rooted in female subjectivity, sensuality and inner life.

Baya rose to international fame at just 16, when she held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. Her vibrant, patterned compositions—filled with women, birds, plants and musical instruments—reimagine North African womanhood on her own terms. Rather than exoticised objects, her female figures exist in joyful, autonomous worlds, often in harmony with nature and each other. Admired by figures such as André Breton and Pablo Picasso, Baya created a practice that was both modern and deeply personal. Her work has been the subject of renewed institutional attention, with a major retrospective at the Sharjah Art Museum (2021) and inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Juliana Seraphim, born in Jaffa and based in Beirut, developed a poetic Surrealist style to explore desire, memory and the subconscious from a distinctly female perspective. Working primarily in ink and watercolour, her layered, dreamlike compositions feature recurring female forms, often intertwined with wings, masks or architectural motifs. Her art challenges the patriarchal norms of the time, presenting femininity as multifaceted, erotic, and emotionally complex. Seraphim represented Lebanon in several international biennials during the 1960s and was recently featured in Arab Presence: Modern Art and Decolonisation at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024) and The Golden Sixties at the Biennale de Lyon (2022), alongside artists including Etel Adnan and Huguette Caland.