Joseph Clark featured in The Art Journal's Next-Gen Collectors

The feature

In its Next-Gen Collectors series, The Art Journal profiles Joseph Clark, the 27-year-old collector whose holding of modern and contemporary art has taken shape since his late teens. Written by Ella Slater, the piece follows a collector who did not grow up in the art world, and who runs a digital production studio alongside collecting, building the collection through studio visits, research, and conviction rather than inherited access.

Clark is candid about the culture around collecting. Asked what he would tell someone starting out, he is blunt: "The exclusivity is a facade anyway."

A collection with a point of view

The collection spans significant names in modern and contemporary art — Louise Bourgeois, Phyllida Barlow, and Glenn Ligon among them, alongside Dana Schutz, Sutapa Biswas, and a younger generation including Mia Chaplin and Tai Shani. What connects the works is less a market logic than a set of recurring concerns: memory, identity, the body, and the provisional.

Three of these works — Bourgeois's Untitled (1998), Barlow's Untitled: Grinder (2014), and Ligon's Study for the White Series (1995) — are the subject of our own editorial entries, where we set out the context and significance behind each piece.

Read the profile

Read Ella Slater's full profile of Joseph Clark in The Art Journal.