'He was a true artist....there was no sense of wanting' (Ib Kamara, 2025)
Barry Kamen (1963-2015) became well known as a model and stylist as part of the Buffalo collective led by Ray Petri in the 1980s, a movement which went on to change British fashion forever. Buffalo had a huge ripple effect worldwide - and Kamen’s legacy in styling and fashion is well documented. What is less known is his extraordinary work as an artist, with a mature and dedicated studio practise that spanned a 30-year period.
In 2015, after his death from an undiagnosed heart defect, his work remained in storage until 2022, when the Barry Kamen Estate was formed to explore his artistic legacy - with a mission to archive, research, exhibit and promote his work as an artist. The Estate counted as early patrons Ib Kamara (Creative Director, Off-White), British filmmaker Daniel Kleinman and Jonathan Freedman of Brutus Jeans.
Kamen was famously private about his studio practise, perhaps using it as a refuge from the commercial demands made of him in fashion. For this reason, his work never gained the support of a major gallery during his lifetime, although he took part in various important group shows throughout the 1990s. His first major solo show as an artist took place in 1989 at Jean-Paul Gaultier's studio; the exhibition sold out, and no works from that show remain in his archive. Notable later exhibitions in the UK included 'Art Tube 01' in 2001 alongside Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono, Fiona Banner, Gavin Turk and posthumously at the ICA in 2016 as part of Judy Blame's retrospective 'Never Again'.
However, with the work of his Estate, his work is slowly gaining a reputation as being an undiscovered treasure of contemporary art in the UK, especially since Kamen, as a British-Burmese artist and as a member of the the vast Asian diaspora, has a unique take on the aesthetics of British culture and colonial history. Christie's placed Kamen’s first ever work in auction in 2023. In 2024, his work gained its first posthumous exhibition in Japan entitled 'Barry Kamen: Is Is It And' at Lurf Gallery (Tokyo) and later at Estnation (Tokyo), with an accompanying clothing capsule based on the artist's own designs. That same year, Barry's work was featured in two major institutional exhibitions; 'The Fashion Show: Eveything but the Clothes (V&A Dundee, Scotland) and 'The Missing `Thread: Untold Stories of Black British Fashion' (Somerset House, London).
In October 2025, to mark ten years of his passing, his first posthumous solo exhibition opened at Graces Mews, London. The exhibition attracted press from The Face, Monocle, System Magazine and others. While the Estate continues to work hard to gain institutional support for Kamen's extraordinary body of work, his work can be found in various private collections of the colleagues and friends with whom he contributed to form the British aesthetic, copied and reviered worldwide. Current collectors of Barry Kamen's artworks include Stella McCartney, Tyrone and Frank Lebon, Jean Paul Gaultier, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Helmut Lang, Azzedine Allaia, Rifat Ozbek, Georgina Goodman, Steve Barron, Takeo Kikuchi, John Maybury, Robert Elms, Gary Kemp, Mitsuo Suma, John Taylor, Diana Ross, Linda Bennet, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp, Naomi Campbell and Neneh Cherry.