The Moroccan British artist Hassan Hajjaj will bring his work to Sotheby’s in London this summer with a selling exhibition and a takeover of the Story Café on New Bond Street. On view from 13 July to 7 August 2026, Hassan Hajjaj: My London Rockstars, Ends to Estates is the artist’s personal homage to the city and marks the latest chapter of his My Rockstars series, an ongoing project initiated in the early 2000s that focuses on the figures in his global community of friends and fellow artists. All works are for sale through Vigo Gallery.
Operating across photography, fashion, installation and design, Hajjaj has developed a visual language that fuses North African street culture with pop art and global fashion imagery. Shot in Marrakech, London or wherever he can improvise a studio by pinning a patterned textile to a wall, his photographs are characterised by an exuberant mix of colours and patterns, with subjects often dressed in clothes he has designed or styled himself. He will also transform Sotheby’s café with an immersive takeover in his signature style, in keeping with his vibrant cafés and tea salons in Marrakech and Paris.
The exhibition spotlights an ascendant generation of cultural figures shaping London’s contemporary landscape, including portraits of the painter Slawn Olaolu, the fashion designer Clint 419, the drill and hip-hop star Central Cee, the director Walid Labrim, and the singer Joy Crookes. The pictures were taken over the past few years, when many of their subjects were only beginning their ascent, and the title pays homage to their journeys from public housing to cultural cachet.
Curator, writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun notes that Hajjaj saves the term “ Rock Star” only for those he feels a real affinity with, so that the “ My” in the series title does as much work as the appellation itself. Seen together, Eshun writes, the works in Ends to Estates celebrate a city continually in the process of being remade.
Born in the Moroccan fishing town of Larache, Hajjaj moved to London with his family in 1973, aged 12. He dropped out of school at 15 and, through the following decade of strikes and unemployment, sold second-hand clothes in Camden market, promoted underground club nights and worked on film shoots. In 1984 he opened a clothes shop in Covent Garden selling his own streetwear label, R.A.P. (“ Real Artistic People”), positioning himself amid a burgeoning London creative scene alongside pirate radio DJs, rappers and musicians such as Soul II Soul and the Young Disciples. He began to practise as an artist in the mid-1990s.
Works by Hassan Hajjaj are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Newark Museum, LACMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Farjam Collection in Dubai, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, MAXXI in Rome, MACAAL in Marrakesh and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, among others. Prints, in editions of 5, are available to buy, with prices starting at £17,000.
(Press Release)
