Meet Mr Doodle, the 27-year-old artist whose cartoons now sell for $1m apiece

The latest young British artist to crack the international art market is Mr Doodle (real name Sam Cox), a 27-year-old tousle-haired former graphic illustration student at University of the West of England, Bristol, whose work I would describe as a cross between the late American graffiti artist, Keith Haring, and Mr Men.

Cox, an irrepressible marker-pen doodler from a young age, covered his bedroom with doodles from as young as six years old. Art commentators have suggested he suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - although the artist corrected them describing his practice as ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Drawing'. He adopted his name after he turned up at his Bristol college one day in his late teens wearing an outfit covered in his own spaghetti-like doodles.

For his first exhibition, at London’s Hoxton gallery in 2016, he covered the walls with a single doodle mural depicting an imaginary DoodleLand vision of the world, where dense clusters of cartoon characters, objects and patterns grow and multiply relentlessly. But it passed the art critics by.

DoodleLand was to find a more receptive audience in Asia. In 2018 he was given a show at the Ara Art Centre in Seoul where he was spotted by the Anzai Gallery from Tokyo, which gave him two further exhibitions in 2019. In December that year, Sotheby’s got in on the action with a selling exhibition in Hong Kong which saw all 52 works sell out, with prices ranging from $6,200 to $25,640.

At that point, nothing by Mr Doodle had appeared at auction. But such had been the demand at his exhibitions, that owners realised those stuck on a gallery waiting list might pay much more than gallery prices at auction. How right they were.

His first appearance at auction (a self-portrait sculpture) sold in Japan in March 2020 for $2,000, after which the flood gates opened. Over the next nine months nearly 300 of his works were sold at auction.

Art Price, the auction data analyst in Paris, has rated Mr Doodle the most successful international artist under 30 at auction last year, with prices rising to $1.02 million at a sale in Tokyo in December for a four-metre, black-on-green doodle called Spring, reminiscent in its teeming mass of activity of a manic ‘Where’s Wally?’

As can be expected, Mr Doodle has a large following on Instagram - numbering 2.8 million at the last count – more than double Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons put together. Apart from Doodle paintings and drawings he has collaborated on a growing number of brand-name products with designs and performances for labels such as Fendi, Puma, Adidas and Samsung. And on the platform he’s no elusive artist - he seems likeable and jokey and uses his following to promote charities.

Until now, the only art gallery that has represented him is the Anzai Gallery. With contenders from all over the world knocking at his door, it was only a matter of time before more international representation would materialise.

So, it came as no surprise to me this week when I received a phone call from Jo Brooks, Banksy’s publicist, telling me that Mr Doodle is also to be represented by Pearl Lam, a glamorous dealer in art and design, rated as one of the most significant businesswomen in Asia by Forbes Magazine, with galleries in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore and an office in London.

I first met Lam, the daughter of Lim Por-yen, a Hong Kong real-estate tycoon and founder of the Lai Sun Group, in 2007 when she held a lavish dinner dance during the first Contemporary Art Fair at her adjoining mansion on the exclusive Hengshan Road.

Among the guests were Christopher Davidge, the former chief executive of Christie’s who blew the whistle on the collusive “price-fixing” case that shook the art world in 2001; Simon Groom, curator of Tate Liverpool’s contemporary Chinese art show and currently the Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Howard Bilton, Hong Kong businessman and instigator of the Sovereign Art Prize for Asian art; and Philip Dodd, the former Institute of Contemporary Arts director who was working on a digital arts festival in the city.

Whether such luminaries of the art world deem Mr Doodle’s doodles as art is a good question. But in the world of business, it doesn’t matter.

Cox, the artist behind Mr Doodle, said: “I am delighted that this plan has finally hatched! For me, this is a great opportunity to be presented alongside many other diverse artists and to cover the world with doodles. I feel sure that together we can create some of my most ambitious projects to date.”

Pearl Lam, who plans to publicly launch her relationship with Mr Doodle on her stand at the prestigious Art Basel Hong Kong contemporary art fair from May 19th added: “This is an exciting and symbiotic collaboration that allows us to support Mr Doodle’s career as he, in turn, brings our gallery into the future. He is a voice of his generation, and we feel that as a gallery, it is our duty to provide a platform to a representative of this new era of artists.”

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