Middlesbrough Art Week: Are you looking at a future Turner Prize winner?

46 Linthorpe Rd coming alive for MAW 2025

As the Turner Prize arrives in Middlesbrough this September, the town will be firmly in the spotlight as one of the UK’s destinations for contemporary art. While the Turner Prize celebrates artists who have already reached the highest levels of recognition, Middlesbrough Art Week creates opportunities to discover new work, new voices and artists at different stages of their careers.

For artists having the opportunity to be seen at the right moment can be transformative. A first solo exhibition, a major commission or simply the opportunity to place their work in front of a new audience can become the beginning of something much bigger.

That is part of what makes Middlesbrough Art Week so exciting. Alongside established and internationally recognised names, the festival creates a platform for artists who are still developing their practices, building their reputations and finding their place within the wider art world.

This year, four artists in particular demonstrate the breadth of talent coming through the region and beyond: Izzie Beirne, Alia Gargum, Liz Wilson and Errol Theunissen. All artists at different stages of their careers who have already achieved significant milestones and whose work suggests there is plenty more amazing things to come.

Izzie Beirne

Newcastle-born, London-based artist Izzie Beirne has quickly established a distinctive painting practice exploring domesticity, violence and power through a feminist lens.

 Working primarily with painting, Beirne draws on found cinematic imagery, manipulating figures and bodies until they become fragmented, blurred and almost dreamlike. Hands, faces and bodies appear cropped or disembodied, creating an unsettling tension between intimacy and entrapment.

 Her work has already taken her to galleries and exhibitions across the UK and internationally, including Guts Gallery, Unit and Plan X in Milan. She was the recipient of the Almacantar Award and studio residency in 2023 and has since been shortlisted for awards including the Robert Walters Prize and the Mosaic Award.

 With a Moosey residency in 2026 and a forthcoming residency with Good Eye Projects, Beirne is entering an increasingly significant stage of her career. Her work demonstrates exactly what makes emerging artists so exciting, practices that are already distinctive but still evolving.

Alia Gargum

Sculpture and installation artist Alia Gargum brings a deeply personal perspective to her work, exploring politics, culture and heritage. Her practice combines critical research with personal experience, creating work that considers how identity, history and culture are carried, transformed and understood. 

Gargum's relationship with Middlesbrough Art Week goes back to 2024, when she exhibited as part of the festival. Since then, her career has continued to gather momentum.

In 2025, she presented her first solo exhibition, ḵawwāfa / خَوَّافَة, at 36 Lime Street in Newcastle. She has also received the Hatton Prize for outstanding ambition in the installation of Newcastle University's MFA Graduate Show, as well as the Bartlett Award for sustainability from the Newcastle School of Fine Art.

For an artist working across sculpture and installation, those early recognitions are significant and point towards a practice with plenty of room to develop.

Liz Wilson

Liz Wilson's work sits somewhere between art, technology, industry and ecology. 

Working across print, moving image, sound and sculpture, Wilson explores the relationship between humans and machines, particularly the shift from industrial to post-industrial society and the growing role of automation in our lives. Her career already includes an impressive list of exhibitions, commissions and collaborations. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Taoxichuan Museum of Art in China, Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Hockney Gallery in London.

She has also worked directly with organisations including Hitachi Rail and CNC Robotics, producing ambitious works that bring together technology, sound, sculpture and moving image.

Her recent trajectory is particularly striking. In 2024, she created OF CONFLUENCE, an immersive installation commissioned as part of the Turner Prize wraparound programme, bringing together local communities, sound and sculpture to explore the ecology of the tidal river.

In 2025, she curated and exhibited in Radical Pairings at the National Festival of Making, while her work was shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and exhibited as part of the Aesthetica Art Prize.

She is also a recent recipient of the BBA Art Award, with work scheduled to be presented in Berlin and at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 2026.

Wilson is a fantastic example of how an artist's career can build through commissions, collaborations, exhibitions and opportunities each one creating the platform for the next. 

Errol Theunissen

Errol Theunissen's route into the art world has been very different. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Theunissen is a wholly self-taught painter and illustrator. His practice is rooted in his own environment, experiences and memories, with vivid colour and a strong connection to his African heritage running throughout his work.

Working predominantly in oil on canvas and linen, Theunissen finds his subjects close to home rather than searching for conventional ideas of beauty. Everyday surroundings become the starting point for paintings and drawings that combine observation with memory.

He was recently selected to exhibit Forbidden Love at the Bankley Open in Manchester and was one of twenty artists selected for the Curated FairArtFair at Unit 1 Gallery in London. His oil painting The Visitor was also selected for the Northern Open at Gallagher & Turner Gallery in Newcastle.

For a self-taught artist, these opportunities represent important steps towards a wider audience and demonstrate how quickly a practice can gain momentum when it finds the right platforms.

Why discovering artists early matters

There is something particularly exciting about encountering an artist before everyone else knows their name. The Turner Prize represents one of the biggest moments in the British art calendar and every artist who reaches that stage has had a point earlier in their career when they were still experimenting, developing their voice and looking for opportunities to be seen.

That is where festivals like Middlesbrough Art Week can play an important role.

By bringing emerging artists into the same conversation as established names, the festival gives audiences the chance to discover artists at an earlier stage and gives those artists the opportunity to reach new audiences.

Perhaps, years from now, we’ll look back at the artists exhibiting at Middlesbrough Art Week 2026 and recognise some very familiar names.

Not because Middlesbrough Art Week can predict who will win the Turner Prize.

But because you have seen them here first.