Having bought the house in 2019, he stripped it of all ornament and has now embarked on the huge task of doodling over the entire property - inside and out. His six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion is his current canvas. “I want my work to consume as much of the planet as it can,” Cox says.
His style has been largely consistent since he was a student: improvised illustrations of cute creatures and anthropomorphic objects, applied in a tight lattice with spray paint or a pen as thick as a bingo marker. He is wearing clothes covered in his doodles, and sitting in a room whose walls, floors and ceiling feature more of the same.
He will show at Art Basel Hong Kong later this month (his market is particularly strong in East Asia, where Lam has her two galleries) and he is in discussions about museum shows in the UK and Asia.Ĭox is a polite, serious 27-year-old who logs on to our video call from his home in Kent, south-east England. In April, Pearl Lam Galleries announced it would represent Mr Doodle globally. Now that the horse has bolted, art world gatekeepers are rushing to bring him into their stable. Artnet ranked him the year’s fifth biggest auction success under 40. Over the course of the year, he sold 158 works at public auction, with sales totalling nearly $4.7m. In August, a canvas called “Spring” sold for almost $1m at the Tokyo Chuo Auction. Then, in 2020, Mr Doodle became an art market sensation.
Until last year, Mr Doodle (real name Sam Cox) was little known outside of Instagram, where videos of him applying his intricate “graffiti spaghetti” to large surfaces were regularly enjoyed by his 2.7m followers. Do artists need art critics? The trajectory of the British artist known as Mr Doodle would suggest they currently do not - nor fancy galleries, fair booths and museum shows.
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