Maddox Gallery, Celine Ali and “Night Thoughts”

At Splint Invest, we believe that great art can be both culturally resonant and financially intelligent. Together with Maddox Gallery, one of our earliest and most trusted art partners, we are building an investment offering that does justice to both sides of that equation.

A partnership built on expertise

Since the beginning of our collaboration, Maddox Gallery has been instrumental in shaping our contemporary art strategy. As a leading London gallery and advisory, their team brings a rare combination of portfolio management experience, deep knowledge of art as an asset class, and hands‑on insight into the global contemporary market.

Working closely with our investment team, Maddox has helped us curate more than 100 works into the Splint Invest portfolio, with a strong focus on artists who combine critical recognition with demonstrable price momentum. Together, we achieved our first successful exit in 2025, delivering a net return of 26.2% for our investors in under a year and validating our shared conviction that carefully selected contemporary art can generate compelling risk‑adjusted returns.

Building on this track record, we now have two additional exits with Maddox confirmed for May 2026, with projected net ROI of up to 27%. These exits not only unlock liquidity for our community, they also reinforce the role of curated art exposure as a powerful diversifier alongside traditional asset classes.

Spotlight on Celine Ali: a rising feminist voice

Our next release with Maddox centres on London‑based painter Celine Ali, whose work stands at the intersection of feminist storytelling, psychological interiors and market momentum. Born in 1997 and of Romanian‑Turkish heritage, Ali has already accumulated over a decade of exhibition experience across galleries and institutions—a remarkable trajectory for an artist in her twenties and a strong signal of early institutional confidence.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, Ali is known for her luminous faceless figures set in domestic interiors that read as psychological landscapes rather than simple rooms. By stripping away facial features, she invites viewers—especially women—to project their own experiences of intimacy, vulnerability and resilience into the scene, turning each painting into a mirror for complex inner lives rather than a fixed portrait.

Her practice aligns closely with the contemporary feminist movement in art: challenging inherited narratives of womanhood, interrogating the domestic sphere, and reclaiming spaces traditionally coded as private or minor as sites of power, reflection and self‑possession. This conceptual depth is one reason Ali has attracted growing attention from curators and collectors.

“Night Thoughts” (2024): art, autonomy and upside

Our new art investment opportunity, “Night Thoughts” (2024), sits squarely within this narrative. The work is a large‑scale oil on canvas measuring 150 x 200 cm, a museum‑grade format that reinforces its presence and long‑term importance within Ali’s oeuvre.

Conceptually, “Night Thoughts” embodies many of the themes driving renewed collector interest in feminist figuration. The domestic setting becomes a stage for questions around identity, emotional labour and the tension between outward composure and inner complexity. Rather than offering a didactic statement, Ali allows ambiguity to do the work: viewers are encouraged to read their own experiences of solitude, desire, doubt or defiance into the composition.

Between 2023 and 2025, Ali's average private sale price at JD Malat Gallery rose from £12,000 to £18,000, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 22.5%. Following representation by Maddox Gallery, secondary market results showed a further 24.9% uplift, with average realised prices reaching £22,429 in early 2026.

The investment case

Within Splint Invest, the “Night Thoughts” release has been structured to offer a clear, data‑driven thesis while remaining accessible to a broad base of investors. The target investment horizon is 3–5 years, with a planned exit between 2029 and 2031, allowing time for Ali’s gallery representation, institutional visibility and collector base to expand further.

On a balanced scenario, we model an expected net CAGR of 20.0% per annum after fees, with an ambitious case of around 22.1% per annum, informed by both her primary gallery pricing and recent secondary‑market results. The entry price reflects a 10.5% premium to current market levels after fees—an intentional positioning in light of Ali’s strengthening commercial profile and the scarcity of prime works in this scale and category.

Even with this premium, the risk‑return profile remains attractive. Our quantitative framework assesses a solid risk‑adjusted return relative to the volatility typical of emerging artists, supported by a broad set of comparable sales that provide a robust benchmark for both entry pricing and upside potential.

Female artists

The broader market context reinforces this momentum. Works by female artists achieved an average CAGR of 7.6% between 2021 and mid‑2025, while average sale prices rose 20.6% year on year. Demand has expanded across all price bands, with sales increasing 136% in segments below £38,500 and 70% above £770,000, demonstrating both accessibility and strong engagement from high‑value collectors.

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