On Thursday, ten artists accused London’s Arusha Gallery of failing to pay nearly $700,000 in long overdue payments in a joint statement to the Art Newspaper. A day later, several more artists reached out to ARTnews to complain about the gallery’s conduct and claim they’re also owed money.
Thursday’s joint statement came from artists Pippa Young, Anna Rocke, Plum Cloutman, Ilona Szalay, Megan Rea, Kate Walters, Gail Harvey, Morwenna Morrison, Helen Flockhart, and Charlotte Keates. In the statement, they claimed that they have faced “extreme difficulty obtaining payment for sold work—often waiting months or even years to receive funds owed.”
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But the artist with the largest grievance, according to her lawyer Jon Sharples, is Keates, who has worked with Arusha Gallery for a decade. (Arusha opened in Edinburgh in 2013 and in London in 2023.) In statutory demands made by Sharples, Keates said she is owed £430,000 ($580,000) from the sales of artworks dating back to 2023. However, Keates did not sign consignment agreements with the gallery and the gallery’s owner, Bella Arusha Collins King, has reportedly denied in legal letters that Keates is owed so much, according to TAN.
In an email, Sharples told ARTnews that Keates’ agreements with Arusha “were oral and undocumented, but were obviously binding consignment agreements in the sense that Charlotte authorized Arusha to act as agent for sales of her work.” Sharples further argued that despite the lack of “specific payment terms,” the law implies that payment should be made in a “reasonable time.” He added, “Arusha’s non-payment stretches back to the show they staged for Charlotte in May 2023 so there can be no credible argument that they were legally entitled to withhold funds for that long.”
In legal letters reviewed by TAN, Collins King’s lawyer, Neville Takiar, argued that Arusha Gallery is entitled to a 50 percent cut of proceeds from a partnership Keates recently entered into with Hermés, the luxury fashion brand.
Sharples disputed that characterization to TAN, calling Arusha’s claims “totally without merit and are an unhelpful distraction from the straightforward reality which is that Arusha Gallery has encountered trading difficulties and has withheld Charlotte’s funds to plug shortfalls elsewhere in the business.”
The gallery did acknowledge to TAN that some payments to artists are missing, writing, “We are desperately sorry that some artists have still not been paid what they are owed and that some customers are without works for which they have paid; we understand how serious that is.”
Keates is far from the only artist claiming non-payment. Plum Cloutman, one of the artists signed to the joint statement, told ARTnews that she is owed around $3,000 from sales of a show held one year ago at Arusha. In Cloutman’s case, she said that she did sign a consignment agreement with the gallery, but the agreed window for payment passed.
“After the show I would get payments of £40 or £45 every now and then for a number of sketches, sometimes every other day, but not always, and never more than one payment in a day,” Cloutman said. “I started to really worry after the payment window in the consignment agreement the gallery and I signed passed. Eventually I was paid for the three remaining paintings, but that was after dozens and dozens of pleading emails, and after I had to borrow money to pay my taxes. Bella promised I would be paid by the tax deadline multiple times, but unsurprisingly that didn’t happen.”
Four other artists—not named in the statement—came forward to ARTnews claiming that Arusha owed them money for the sale of artworks: Beth Carter, Andrei Pokrovskii, Fiona Finnegan, and another who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Bruno Gilbert, who represents the trust of his father, the late Scottish artist Norman Gilbert, also told ARTnews that Arusha owes the trust money for the sale of artworks.
“I am still awaiting payment for works consigned to the gallery—an issue I’ve tried to resolve for some time,” Finnegan told ARTnews in an email. She said she signed consigner agreements with the gallery. “I’ve also learned that some of my works may have been sold but not delivered, and others remain in storage due to unresolved fees. My experience now appears not to be unique.”
Carter, meanwhile, told ARTnews in an email that she started working with the gallery in 2017. Over the last two years, she said, the gallery became less reliable and payments were often delayed. Collins King, Carter claimed, “made continuous promises to pay by certain dates and then those dates passed with no payment or explanation,” adding that the gallery still owes her around $8,600 for two works delivered to clients in January.
“The courier who delivered them has not been paid for this delivery,” Carter said. “I have been contacted recently by a collector who has paid Arusha for a piece of my work in full but not received it. I have not been paid for this work by Arusha.”
The artist who wished to remain anonymous told ARTnews that they consigned around 30 works to Arusha for a show in 2023. “I began to suspect that something was wrong, I asked my friend who is a prominent entertainment lawyer in New York City, to write Bella letters to try to get my work back as I was worried since no sales had occurred and so much was promised me,” they wrote in an email. “After much back and forth they finally mailed all the work back to me packed badly, but at least now in my possession.”
Gilbert claimed to ARTnews that Arusha owes the Norman Gilbert estate seven outstanding sales invoices totalling approximately $28,000 from 2023 to this year. “Also outstanding is an £7,500 ($10,000) oil painting which we want returned or the amount of £3,409.09 ($5,000) to be remitted,” Gilbert said in an email. “While delaying and making innumerable excuses for late payment of artwork sales invoices we were regularly being promised additional exposure of my father paintings in European Art Fairs, additional Home Counties art galleries and the Frieze Masters show in London, none of which materialised. Latterly the gallery’s explanations and rationalisations had zero credibility and most recently Arusha has not responded at all to correspondence.”
Neither Collins King nor her lawyer responded to ARTnews’ request for comment.
In a statement to TAN, Arusha pointed to the art market’s recent stagnation, which it said saw “performance drop off sharply and unexpectedly in 2024 and into 2025.” The gallery also said the unexpected death in January of Collins King’s partner and gallery co-owner, Guy Rowland Maxwell Bargery, compounded its troubles. The gallery has been “working exceptionally hard through a crisis to turn things around over recent months,” the statement said, including “scaling back operations, seeking time to pay arrangements with creditors and, in good faith, striving to trade out of these difficulties.”
Despite the gallery’s struggles, Arusha, according to TAN, is still pressing ahead with plans to build a wellness and exhibition space on the outskirts of the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. The space will be in an historic cottage called Llwynywermod, which is King Charles’s former Welsh holiday home. TAN reported that the gallery posted on Instagram and Facebook in January that the new space was to be a “dynamic new flagship venue” that is “envisioned as a gallery with additional expansive spaces for performances, retreats and workshops [and is due to be an] exceptional destination for contemporary art, art education and culture.” Those posts have since been deleted.
In Arusha’s statement to TAN, Collins King said that the Welsh space is “an entirely separate enterprise, and its primary focus is not and was never art.”
Young, one of the artists signed to the joint statement, disputed to ARTnews Collins King’s assertion that the Wales project was not about art. “She was pushing me to have an exhibition there this May, and she wanted me to make a painting to be part of a ‘permanent collection,’” Young said. “It was to be a contemporary art hub along the lines of Hauser and Wirth in Somerset.”
Young added that she is part of a WhatsApp group “with at least 25-30 artists all of whom have suffered at the gallery’s hands.”
