The largest Art on a Postcard Winter Auction to date will take place this November, in celebration of twenty years of The Hepatitis C Trust. This marks the seventh edition of the Art on a Postcard auction and culminates their celebration of twenty successful years raising awareness for the illness, supporting those living with it and taking key steps towards its eradication. For this edition 250 artists, including Ryan Mosely, Petra schott, Lisbeth Mitty and Hurvin Anderson, have created approximately 550 unique, mini postcard masterpieces. The Art on a Postcard auction is an essential and innovative fundraising tool, forming a key pillar of The Hepatitis C Trust’s annual operations.

This auction sees the return of Art on a Postcard’s loyal contributors including Royal Academician Mick Rooney, whose imaginative story paintings explore inner mythologies, neurosis, dreams and the secrets of modern society. His commissioned works include a wall mosaic for a new Basilica in Nazareth, Israel and a painting in honour of The Financial Times centenary in 1988.

British painter Peter Messer who uses his native Lewes as a backdrop his sometimes-supernatural metaworld, full of ghostly figures at windows or lurking in trees and always against a Sussex wall absorbed into an everyday setting.

Deborah Batt whose work lies in between abstract and representational has also created a piece for the auction. Deborah has said her work ‘comes originally from the idea of community. The towns and structures we build and the way we shape and neglect the natural and urbanised landscape. In my pictures there is a melancholy a trace of something already lost and I try to recapture that moment in time’.

For this exciting edition, new artists have joined the auction including Hurvin Anderson, Petra Schott, Lisbeth Mitty, and Peter Messer. Hurvin Anderson is a painter born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents; his vibrant works utilise the genres of still-life, landscape, and portraiture to explore representations of community and identity. He uses layered paintings and prints to touch upon his Jamaican heritage and the places, and spaces that are central to his communities.

German painter Petra Schott creates semi-abstracted colourscapes which aim to bring viewers back to internal and existential questions plus Sheffield based artist Ryan Mosely whose narrative style of painting was including in The Whitechapel’s show Painting in the New Millennium. New York based painter Lizbeth Mitty’s body of work — described by New York Times critic Ken Johnson as a combination of “painterly verve and hellish beauty” — has long been concerned with examining and amplifying the intrinsic abstract beauty of deteriorating or overlooked corners of urban architecture and interiors.

Peter Messer is a British painter who works most often in tempera; on Peter “His ‘motif’, very wisely, is for the present time a distillation in paint of his inner turmoil and his small victories over it,”. These artists, among many others, will each create a handmade, postcard scale mini-masterpiece for auction, with all proceeds going to The Hepatitis C Trust.

Gemma Peppé, founder and director of Art on a Postcard, comments: “This year’s auction is so full of exceptional little works; it feels like there is an unconventional theme which has come together on its own and which is perfect for a celebration of The Hepatitis C Trust’s 20 years. The Trust stands alone in its glorious, idiosyncratic unconventionality, we have never followed a formula or rules and many of us hadn’t worked in an office when we started. It’s a miracle we’ve got where we are now.”

In its twenty years of operation, The Hepatitis C Trust has made an incredible difference to the lives of those living with this disease. Due to the Trust’s work, the illness has been lifted from obscurity; when they began their vital work there was almost no public information surrounding Hepatitis C, currently the disease is much more widely understood, sufferers are receiving more effective treatment and support, and large steps are being taken towards eradicate the disease. Art on a Postcard is an example of The Trust’s innovative approach to charity work and is an essential fundraising tool for The Trust.