Russell Tovey curates limited edition prints for Counter Editions x Magic Breakfast project

The actor Russell Tovey has curated artwork for a new fundraising project between Counter Editions and the children’s charity Magic Breakfast.

The project has seen five leading international artists create signed limited edition prints for people to buy, with a third of profits raised to go to Magic Breakfast. The charity provides more than 200,000 daily healthy breakfasts to children in need across the country.

Magic Breakfast understands that 4 million children in the UK live in homes that have experienced food insecurity. This means that food is not always a guarantee. The charity also says 81% of its partner schools believe that child hunger has risen in the past year.

The charity has also noted that pupils in primary schools offering school breakfast worked better over the course of a year compared to children in schools without breakfast in the early stages of education. Magic Breakfast’s 2023 survey also found that 87% of partner schools believe the charity has a positive impact on attainment

From 28 May 2024, the prints will be available individually as well as portfolios exclusively from CounterEditions.com, the UK’s leading website for buying contemporary art.

The five artists are:

Katherine Bradford

The American artist’s ‘Person with Colors’ shows a genderless figure whose torso, as well as the backdrop, is made up of rich multicolour stripes. Bradford repeatedly features swimmers and bodies of water in her paintings. Although these blocks or bands of colour signify a representational space – a pool, the ocean – they are also abstract fields of pigment, studies of colour, and light. Their anonymity gives them an everyman quality. Printed in bright pinks, peaches, oranges, and neon greens, they appear to glow from within, illuminating their backdrops.

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel sources her subject matter from her own photographs of the people of color who share and shape her environment. ‘Sunset’ (2024), edition of 100, is a continuance of Casteel’s ongoing “subway” or “crop” series–each subject sourced from candid encounters on the NYC subway. An anonymous sitter in ‘Sunset’ (2024) is composed with a palette that renders their skin tone with the vivid hues of dusk, seemingly bursting from a tie-dyed tank top at the core of the composition. Hand embellishing the screenprint with gouache, Casteel has used silver, gold, crimson, lilac, and yellow to enhance various details within the frame.

Ulala Imai

The Japanese artist paints scenes drawn from both her familial life and popular culture. She works in her home, transforming her children’s toys, quotidian foods, and other household items into mysterious and lifelike subjects. For this whimsical print, she revisits her series of still-life paintings of a teddy bear paired with a banana.

Francesca Mollett

The British painter uses paint to express an intimate, porous exchange between a human presence and more-than-human bodies; water, stones, plants, weather. In her paintings, whilst forms verge on being recognizable, thresholds open and then fold in on themselves; the material body dissolves; and structures liquefy. ‘Blushed Hum’ is a return to a source/memory from Margate’s coastal path, where water contained stillness and the surrounding chipped and chalky rock was the element carrying movement. Luminosity emits from the print, different speeds of colour occur, slow fades, and then electric, unexpected, embedded moments of colour; they create a tonal hum.

Nicolas Party

The Swiss-born artist is primarily known for his colour-saturated paintings. Landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of everyday objects, are all pared down to simple volumetric forms stripped of all extraneous detail. For this new print, ‘Party’ depicts a bowl of peaches which are transformed through imaginative, vibrant use of colour, and composition.

The prints will be available individually as well as portfolios exclusively from CounterEditions.com from 28 May 2024.