Dead Darlings is a collective that started in Amsterdam in 2005. We organise a subversive anonymous art-auction to explore the complex relationship between the price and the value of artworks in a world that often conflates the two.

Through an open call, we invite artists to contribute an artwork towards our theme and then we set up an exhibition of the selected works culminating in a dynamic, live auction event.

Dead Darlings XX — In It Together!, W139, 2025. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn.

Our focus is on artefacts whose value is ambiguous: dead darlings. The name is inspired by the phrase “kill your darlings”. Sometimes a strong work, deeply cherished by its maker, must be put aside for the sake of the final result. These artworks are the stars of our show: the undervalued, misunderstood, yet meaningful and beloved outcasts of an artist’s practice. Once rejected, regardless of the cost, time and labour spent to create them, they fall between the cracks, no longer holding monetary significance, lacking the context in which to be exhibited or sold. That’s where we, the Dead Darlings Collective, step in and provide one!

Auction in action! Dead Darlings #22 – Dive into the Archive, 2026. Photo: Dean Maassen.

Audience bidding for works at PAKT Foundation during Dead Darlings #19 – And Now This, 2024. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn.

We create a platform to (re)consider their worth from a different perspective, revealing ideas that were abandoned too soon and hidden gems deserving of a second chance. This demands that each individual collector makes a choice based on feeling, on the intuitive draw toward an art piece.

Because works are auctioned anonymously, our audience is prompted to examine their own value systems. A list of participating artists is made available, but no one knows who made what until after the sale. This adds excitement and anticipation to the auction and invites people to bid on what they truly connect to—something whose value is defined by their desire to share space with it, consider it, live with it every day, not in the purchase of a familiar name they can use to impress their friends, or in its resale potential.

Our amazing white gloves Ro Perez Gayo and Bin Zhu showing artworks during Dead Darlings XX – In It Together, W139, 2025. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn. 

Dead Darlings #9 — Entropy, 2017. Photo: Jessie Yingying Gong.

We set the scene for a more inclusive, alternative standpoint, breaking down and exposing embedded structures that sustain unfair biases. We disrupt convention through enacting its tropes, while rejecting the principles that traditionally enforce them. By faithfully adopting yet also mocking one of the art world’s most rigid conventions, we allow ourselves to be critical while offering artists, audiences, and those unique killed darlings—a forum where value and price remain distinct, and fixed notions of demand and desirability are challenged.

Dead Darlings #20 — Drama!, 2025. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn.

Another feature of our auctions is the radically low prices. This is integral to our philosophy: value is relative, subject to change, and deserves to be reassessed with intention. Symbolic pricing helps to remind people that the auction is a community driven, inclusive, time-based performance, an entertaining show and a work in its own right.

Our inviting low-threshold events draw in audiences as diverse as the artists we work with, seasoned collectors, curious first-timers, artists’ friends and families and, of course, fellow artists. Participation is simple: sign up, collect a paddle, take a seat and leave your expectations behind. Our events are never ticketed and everyone is welcome.

Artists can also be collectors. Dead Darlings #9 — Entropy, 2017. Photo: Jessie Yingying Gong.

Our philosophy is to bring something unseen into the public eye, featuring established artists alongside more obscure, upcoming, or outsider voices. This makes the anonymity resonate, keeps the stakes high, while evening out the playing field.

Since our beginnings, we’ve asked what becomes of these ambivalent works—and how might we help artists dig them up from obscurity, dust them off, and release them into the world.

Dead Darlings #19 – And Now This!, 2024. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn.

In 2025 we started “Darling Killers”, a podcast aimed at digging a little deeper into the motives and circumstances surrounding the death of a darling, one artist at a time! Find our interviews and individual online auctions attached to them, here on our website, and listen directly from the website, Spotify, or Apple podcasts.

Through years of presenting these unique works, we enjoy reflecting on the factors that lead to the death of a darling, but most importantly, we focus on conjuring up that special brand of magic that can bring it back to life!

Dead Darlings XX – In It Together!, 2025. Photo: Kyle Tryhorn.

Today, our collective consists of four core members: Tania Theodorou, Lina Ozerkina, Hanna Mattes, and Jessie Yingying Gong.