It’s 20 years since Britain’s most famous bunch of contemporary artists, the YBAs, emerged on to the scene at Freeze, an exhibition curated by a chap called Damien Hirst in an empty building in London Docklands. They still dominate the headlines, though they have slipped comfortably into the very arts establishment that they began by subverting. But who will succeed them? And where will these young Turks come from? These are the hottest new galleries in the UK today, nurturing, we hope, the stars of tomorrow.

MARY MARY GLASGOW

“I was a practising artist for about a week,” says Hannah Robinson (pictured), the young director of Mary Mary Gallery. “I think I did one show and then I thought, er, no.” It was a good decision – since packing it in after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art, Robinson’s light, airy gallery has garnered attention from all corners of the art world and her stable of nine, mainly female artists (“It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I think I was thinking it would be good”) is steadily growing in profile.

Mary Mary follows in a line of contemporary, commercial galleries in Glasgow, started by former school of art graduates. The Modern Institute was the first in 1998, followed six years later by Sorcha Dallas then, in April 2006, Mary Mary. Each gallery has its own style and feeds off a fertile, supportive scene. “They both had different styles to the things I was seeing around me, and I thought, no one’s showing this,” says Robinson, 26. “It wasn’t so theory-based. It was more personally led, more rooted in the artist.” The sculptor and performer Karla Black, for example, though she filters a great deal of art history through her work, uses very personal materials – including her own body. Or perhaps she will be absent, but the work will be exactly her height, or incorporate her clothes. Black’s work will be part of Tate Britain’s Art Now: Strange Solution group show opening in early February. www.marymarygallery.co.uk

MOOT NOTTINGHAM

“We’re artists, we’re not gallerists,” insists Candice Jacobs, 25, one of the four directors of MOOT in Nottingham. It’s confusing when you’re standing in their gallery space, but Jacobs and her colleagues, Tristan Hessing, 25, Matthew Jamieson, 25 and Tom Godfrey, 26 (pictured, right, from left behind Jacobs) are adamant. “It’s important that we can run the gallery in a way that we can always continue our practice,” she says. So how do they look after their artists? Simply by providing them with a platform, Godfrey says, in a part of the country where the contemporary art scene struggles against public apathy. They are self-funded, though next year they are hoping to receive an organisational development grant from the Arts Council.

Since its opening in October 2005, MOOT has made a name for itself as a stepping stone for artists, thanks to the team’s knack for identifying interesting work with a sense of humour. Most of the artists whom MOOT has exhibited are now catching the attention of big-name galleries. Jonty Lees’s current residency at Tate St Ives followed his 2006 MOOT show, and Mark Harasimowicz recently sold several drawings to Hauser & Wirth Gallery. www.mootgallery.org

ROKEBY LONDON

“I got told off last night for mentioning [the gallery] in bed,” confesses Beth Greenacre, 33, whose husband and business partner, Ed, 32, is grappling with the accounts in Rokeby’s basement. The Central London gallery opened in April 2005, a year and two days after the couple married – and their curfew for discussing it has moved inexorably later. “We knew what to expect in terms of our relationship,” says Beth, “Ed and I were always very adamant that we’d have very separate roles.” So Ed runs the business side of things while Beth, who formerly ran an art consultancy, as well as David Bowie’s Bowieart website, which pioneered the online viewing of artworks, curates Rokeby’s shows and looks after their ten artists – including the installation artist Graham Hudson, who has a commission at Camden Arts Centre this month, and Erica Eyres, several of whose video works and drawings were recently acquired by the powerful Rubell Family Collection in Miami. The gallery itself is named after the famous Velázquez painting known as the Rokeby Venus.

“We don’t really have a house style,” Beth says, “I think that’s kind of dangerous, but it’s got to be quality. It has to be somebody who is aware of recent aesthetic and conceptual concerns; aware of their immediate art historical lineage. All our artists use their materials with skill and expertise. But really I think it’s more of a conceptual thing.”

“When we’re looking at artists or going to degree shows we want to see progression of work,” adds Ed. “We don’t have to see exactly where it’s going, but that it’s going to be exciting. As a gallery you have the opportunity to do something exciting with these people in the long term, which is very rare.” www.rokebygallery.com

WHAT TO BUY AND WHY

What should you buy in these new galleries – whether for pleasure or as a gamble? Here are five possibilities. The best rule is to buy something you like – and trust your taste!

Figurative art has made a comeback lately, and Laura Lancaster has an oil portrait for sale for £1,600 at the Workplace Gallery. But she is a distinctly contemporary artist, and the figure in this picture is a mysterious woman in a chair, glimpsed through black and blue and pink tints, holding an even more ghostly rabbit or hare with madly long ears. One would often look at her on the wall. A good tip is that Lancaster’s work has been bought by UBS and Unilever.

Erica Eyres, at the Rokeby Gallery, is a Canadian who graduated from Glasgow Art School in 2004. She has a drawing for sale for £500 – a dark-marked, sullen face with an awkward arm across the brow, lying by the side of a bland, puffy face in profile. It is all done in a few lines, but it conveys a strong sense of failure and dismay. This is a young artist who knows what she is doing. She has already been bought by the Rubell Family, who keep their collection in a vast warehouse on Miami Beach.

Susan Collis at Seventeen Gallery likes to make us aware of the beauty and interest of commonplace things. In Made Good she offers what looks like two rawlplugs and a screw that might have been used to hang up a picture. But look closer, and you find that it is made of white gold, coral, black onyx, diamond and silver. It costs £2,000. She has work in the V & A’s show Out of the Ordinary.

Karla Black is another essentially conceptual artist. Her work Pleasers Don’t Decide is a hanging Cellophane sheet marked with such liquids as lipstick, hair gel, body moisturiser and Vaseline. As a comment on female beauty and hygiene you have to make of it what you will. It costs £3,600 at Mary, Mary. Black is in the forthcoming Art Now show at Tate Britain.

Jack Strange has a colourful, spiky, abstract collage called Nigel and Chris, which might represent two heads and what he thinks of them. It costs £1,000 at Moot. He has just graduated from the Slade, and should be watched. DERWENT MAY

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