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Michael Abrams is a celebrated contemporary British artist whose extraordinary career embodies a masterful transition from everyday industrial grit to global fine art acclaim. After leaving school, Abrams spent a decade working as a forklift driver by day while tirelessly nurturing his craft by night as a freelance greeting card illustrator. Collaborating with the UK's leading publishing houses, he refined a deeply heartwarming, faux-naïf visual language that eventually allowed him to transition to full-time studio practice in 1990. Over the subsequent decades, his distinctive, emotionally resonant style has catapulted him onto the international stage, culminating in exhibitions in New York, design of a ceramics range for Wedgwood, and the release of two illustrated books by HarperCollins.

His gallery work encompasses two quite different registers: the Bod series of boldly characterful originals, and the warmly comic Ted and Rose figures - a bowler-hatted pair inspired by Magritte and dressed in the elegance of Downton Abbey.