Meet the Panel
Erik Madigan Heck
Erik Madigan Heck is an artist working in photography, painting and film. He is the recipient of the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, the FOAM Fotografiemuseum talent award, the Forbes’ 30 under 30 award, and The Art Director’s Club Gold Medal for his Old Masters Portfolio published by The New York Times Magazine. In 2019 Heck had solo museum exhibitions at The Musée des Beaux-Art in Le Locle, Switzerland and The Multimedia Arts Museum in Moscow, Russia; public installations at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Paris Photo, Photo London, and Photo Shanghai. He relaunched Nomenus, a printed journal focusing on the intersection between photography and painting. Heck is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar amongst others; and is the author of Old Future, published by Thames & Hudson and Abrams, which explores the influence of art, and especially painting, on the history of fashion photography.
Charlotte Hellman Cachin
Charlotte Hellman Cachin is the great-granddaughter of Paul Signac. She is the director of the Signac Archives and is currently updating his catalogue raisonné. She curated the exhibition Signac the Collector at the Musée d’Orsay in 2021 and has written several articles about Signac for various publications. She edited the Signac Diaries (1894-1909, Gallimard, Paris, 2021) and wrote an essay about his personal life, Glissez, mortels, in 2019.
Christopher Riopelle
Christopher Riopelle is The Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London, and co-curator of the Gallery's forthcoming 2024 bicentenary exhibition Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers. He co-curated the Gallery’s 2023 show After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. He has held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, California, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Helena Newman, Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, Worldwide Head of Impressionist and Modern Art
Since joining Sotheby’s in 1988, Helena has been at the forefront of the global expansion of the Impressionist and Modern Art market. In addition to her role as Chairman, specialist and business getter, Helena also plays an important role on the rostrum at Sotheby’s. In July 2016, she became the first woman to take an evening sale since 1990, and she remains the only female auctioneer in the business to preside over these prestigious sales. A role model for aspiring female auctioneers, Helena has brought down the hammer on many landmark occasions (in New York in 2018, she brought down the hammer on the highest value work ever sold at Sotheby’s, and she has similarly presided over the highest value sale ever staged in London). As a classically trained violinist, with an innate sense of the performing skills necessary to command a room, Helena is at the vanguard of women in the art world who are blazing the trail in their industry.
Helena lives in Notting Hill with her husband, who is a musician, and their two children.
