One place where the ticking of the clock counts more than anything else is airports. Have you ever missed a flight? Most people haven’t – we time our travel well. If we aren’t rushing, we might even have time to sit down and take in our surroundings; we might look forward to our favourite place to have that coffee or glass of wine before taking off. Airports are not the spaces that come to mind when we think about great art, but one giant artwork that was revealed last month in Lounge 1 of Schiphol Airport – said to be Europe’s busiest one – might change that view.

As part of a larger development of the entire airport, aimed to provide better flow to its passengers, more way finding, and more purposeful spaces in which to work or slow down, Schiphol’s lounge 1 has been entirely renovated in the past years in a collaboration with architect Eric Wezenberg from ZENBER Architects. A low, meandering wall of vertical wooden slats divides passengers arriving and departing, windows have been opened onto the planes waiting at their gates, and adaptable lighting systems have been installed that glow at different strengths from morning to night. A collaboration with music producer World of Jazz provides a rotating DJ sets at the end of the day. But what I am getting at here is, of course, the art.

Arthur Reijnhart, chief commercial officer at Schiphol, has always loved seeing people standing around Schiphol Clock, a square, white clock in a box-like shape, suspended from the ceiling, by Dutch artist Maarten Baas. On closer look, a man in a blue overall is “living” inside its clockface, his ghost-like silhouette carefully wiping and redrawing the clock’s hands with a roller and paint. So it was only natural that Baas was the artist who Schiphol approached to make a new, larger artwork. Reijnhart is a performer himself, playing violin in various orchestras and acting in amateur theatre, and so he imagined an artwork that was also a bit theatrical, but mostly he and his team wanted to honour the more than 70,000 people working at Schiphol airport. Baas came up with the idea to have not just one person behind the clockface, but an entire crowd, consisting of the people that make Schiphol airport “tick” (pun intended).

“I have a reputation for pushing the limits of my commissioning partners,” Baas said in an interview with Dirk Boelhouwer, on the occasion of the opening of the lounge last month. “With a new artwork I always like to surprise and challenge myself.” Baas told Reijnhart that in order to realise a giant, performative clock, he needed three things: one thousand people, a 32-metre hangar, and an entire weekend. Needless to say, Schiphol had such a hangar (although a plane had to come out first on the day, something that Baas found hilarious and symbolic), and a call was put out to all airport staff to give up a weekend of their time in return for the unique chance to be inside an artwork, and to “become time”.

The result, The People’s Clock, is astounding. A 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 meter installation, suspended in the main foyer, the clock is reminiscent of the ones you find at grand train stations. Behind the white screen of its clockface, a crowd of cleaning staff, security personnel, shop operators, crew and management are filmed from a high point above the centre of the clockface, performing a meticulously choreographed dance in which they together form the clock hands. A long line of people moves in a steady, controlled rhythm (the minutes); one person is running around in a smaller radius (the seconds). As Baas said during the interview, “this work comes back to the main theme I try to express in all my work: to present time on the level of the actions of a human being, to make it palpable and real.”

Maarten Baas’s The People’s Clock is ambitious and it is bold; it stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder in awe. It is Schiphol’s secular Sistine Chapel for the 21^st century. “My hope is that, in one way or another, this work will cause your brain to short-circuit,” Baas explained, “that it will create an experience beyond everyday logic.” But at the same time the clock is intimate, precise, and brought down to earth. The People’s Clock combines the macro and the micro, the universal and the individual; the philosophical and the concrete. Just like time itself: hard to grasp, slipping through our fingers, ultimately elusive, but something we all share on this wild and precious planet.

MUSEUM EXHIBITION TO SEE:

• Kira Freije, Unspeak the Chorus, Modern Art Oxford, 23 May - 16 August
  Freije is nominated for this year’s Turner Prize for her exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield last year, and she is an artist to watch, doing something truly original with figurative sculpture. Her life-sized figures take the shape of metal frames, adorned with bits of clothing and cast faces like masks, and they are both haunting and incredibly humane. Intimate groupings suggest fragments of larger imagined narratives. I have not visited yet, but have read many people being moved to tears by the emotionally charged installation.
  

LONDON GALLERY WEEKEND

TO SEE:

CENTRAL:

• Naotaka Hiro, Others, Herald Street, 20 May - 1 August
  I discovered the Japanese artist, based in LA, at Frieze a few years ago, and was intrigued by his sculptural paintings that sit between abstract action painting and performance. All Hiro’s works are based on his body, wrapping his canvases around it before mounting them on a stretcher, with the holes to put his head and arms through. Although his process is intuitive, colours, motifs and forms recur throughout the works, appearing simultaneously as graphics, maps, diagrams or anatomical indexing systems.

• Oliver Beer, The Sky in the Cave, Thaddaeus Ropac, 5 June - 31 July
  I still remember Thaddaeus Ropac opening its new London gallery in the former residence of the Bishop of Ely in 2017, with Oliver Beer’s performative piece of singers who beautifully brought out the acoustics of the Georgian mansion. Beer’s work uncovers the harmonies that bind people, spaces and cultures together, in spaces ranging from prehistoric caves to the most advanced contemporary buildings — including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Sydney Opera House.

SOUTH:

• Imran Qureshi, Water Bodies, Corvi-Mora, 5 June - 25 July
  Qureshi’s show of miniature paintings at the Barbican’s The Curve in 2016 was one of my favourite uses of that unconventional exhibition space, and his MET roof garden commission in 2013 looked pretty spectacular, too. In previous works, the use of gold-leaf alluded to the celestial plane, in contrast to the vibrant splashes of red, symbolic of blood the vulnerability of the human body. This new series of work responds to politics behind water structures and supply in Lahore, and blue and orange colours take centre stage.

• Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia, Grown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience, William Hine Gallery, 5 June -25 July

  This exhibition was chosen by both the Guardian and the Art Newspaper as one of the LGW highlights. The young artist is based in Glasgow, and has been nominated for several art prizes since finishing her MFA there in 2023. Working with watercolour and pastel on Japanese washi paper, the paintings will be installed in large-scale, suspended collage. Inspired by plays, myths and fables and how they connect to the present, the artist particularly looks at the Medieval and Renaissance periods - the moments where ideas about humanity and society seem to explode as influences from other cultures are absorbed and reinterpreted.

EAST:

• Shazia Sikander, High Skies, Closed Seas, Victoria Miro, 5 June -31 July
  This is VM’s first exhibition since announcing representation of the New York-based artist. A focal point of High Seas; Closed Skies is 3 to 12 Nautical Miles (supported by M+ and debuted in Hong Kong), a radiant cinematic tableau that explores the currents of power and trade that have shaped the global landscape from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Animated from hand-painted images, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles traces the entangled histories of the British East India Company, Mughal India and Qing China.
  

ARTWORKS TO BUY:

CENTRAL:

• Wabi Sabi, Untangling the Meaning of Beauty, group show curated by Marcelle Joseph, Paul Smith Store, Mayfair
  I attended the buzzing opening last night. Joseph is an influential curator and collector of female artists who engage with the performative aspects of identity, and I love how she is making her mark on the London art scene with her clever curatorial vision. Each section of the store is dedicated to one artist, and it feels at once as if the works respond to the brand, with its distinctive colours and stripes, while also standing at a critical distance from its fast world of consumerism and glamour. All the works are for sale with prices starting at £700 - a great place for starting collectors!

  

SOUTH:

• ​Oscar Santillán, Solaris, 28 May - 1 August, Copperfield
  Santillan caught my attention a few years ago at Frieze London with his Wardian case that you could peer into, and he is getting some traction, with a current show in his home country of Ecuador and an artwork in the current Venice Biennale. His series of photographs are installed in a grid: minimalist in form but maximalist in meaning. They are taken in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth and the world’s best-known location for astronomical observation, and home to some of the most powerful lenses in the world. To make this work, the artist collected Atacama sand, which was melted down and turned into glass to form a unique photographic lens: the “eye of the desert” sees the desert itself.

EAST:

• Ally Fallon, At the Still Point of the Turning World, Hales Gallery, 4 June - 14 July
  There is a lot of buzz in the London art world around Fallon - many of the works in this show already sold before opening (the small paintings start from £5,000). London-born and Manchester-based, Fallon was part of Louise Giovanelli’s Apollo Painting School programme in 2024; he was also the youngest artist to win the John Moores Painting Prize 2025 (with a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery forthcoming) and part of New Contemporaries 2026. Combining interior spaces with abstract forms, Fallon’s paintings destabilise the viewer’s initial reading, encouraging a slower, more contemplative mode of looking.

• Pi Artworks, Mehmet Ali Uysal, Skins, 5 June - 4 July
  Pi Artworks celebrates the opening of their new Shoreditch gallery, following thirteen years at 55 Eastcastle Street in Fitzrovia, and expanding into a two-floor industrial building at Perseverance Works in East London. The new space reflects Pi Artworks’ focus on ambitious installation-based practices, and this exhibition Skin by Paris-based Uysal looks really exciting, approaching the walls, floors, and urban structures as if they were living surfaces — stretched, compressed, pierced, displaced, or held under tension.

ARTWORK OF THE MONTH:

Email me here if you are interested in this or other works by the same artist, and I can approach the gallery on your behalf free of charge. I often get a good discount, too, which I will share with you.

Claire Burnett
she needs but gaze and the time traveller, 2022
Oil on velin arches, 46.5 x 32 cm
£900,- each

The Whisperers (Green), 2025
Found insulation and polystyrene, render, tile adhesive, glass tiles, grout, 159 x 68 x 22
£12,000

Claire Burnett, Give and Take is on view until next week at Howick Place, curated by HS Projects

Former president of the Royal Society of Sculptors (2015 – 2022), Burnett’s public sculpture Seedlinks on London’s Timber Square was installed earlier this year. This exhibition by the great curators duo HS Projects, in an office building in Westminster, brings together a significant group of Burnett’s mosaic works. Burnett works with everyday objects collected from streets, markets, kitchens, and gardens, each carrying its own history and associations. Reconfigured and covered in glass tiles, these objects gain new meanings, creating resonances beyond the gallery into domestic and public life.

EXHIBITIONS TO SEE:

IN LONDON:

• Hurvin Anderson, Tate Britain, 26 March - 23 August
  After a very successful 2023 show at Hepworth Wakefield of the barber shop paintings, this is a chance to see over 80 paintings, including Anderson’s atmospheric paintings that hover between landscape and urban setting, between the Carribean and London, and between the familar and the mysterious.

• Saelia Aparicio, A Joyful Parasite, Southwark Park Galleries, 18 April - 5 July
  These two galleries, of which one in an former Grade II listed church, are in set in a large park in Rotherhithe (Southeast London), and have been described as “London's best kept art secret” (so secret in fact, that I had never been there!). Spanish-born, London-based Saelia Aparicio’ s colourful, "flat packed" sculptures explore the complex entanglements between bodies, environments and systems of care. The second space will show Japanese textile artist Emily Waszk, now based in Ireland, showing weavings that use both industrial and traditional techniques.

OUTSIDE LONDON:

• Lucía Pizzani, Faunal Succession, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, 25 March - 30 May
  The first institutional UK exhibition by Venezuelan-born, London-based artist Lucía Pizzani, who collaborated with artists Cecilia Bonilla, Jaime Gili, and Javier Weyler. Pizzani reimagines the Essex coast through a ‘deep time’ lens, linking geological transformation with contemporary questions of climate change, migration, and social transformation.
  *see my 2024 interview with the artist here

• Rothko in Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 14 March - 23 August
  After the incredible Fra Angelico exhibition last year, the museum is now looking at one of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists, celebrating his special band with Florence. Fra Angelico, whom Rothko greatly admired, features again as the exhibition extends to the Museo di San Marco, where Rothko’s work will be in a direct dialogue Fra Angelico’s serene and meditative frescoes.
  

TO SEE AND BUY:

• Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room London, 16 April - 23 June
  This is a great annual event in the London calendar, with artists were invited to respond to an A4 sheet of paper, using any method or medium, with the resulting works exhibited at the gallery and auctioned online during the exhibition’s final two weeks. It is an excellent way to discover new artists, and all the works all for sale and really affordable, with bids starting at £400.
  

MY TOP 5 FROM THE DRAWING BIENNIAL

From top left: Donna Huddleston, William Mackrell, Alexis Soul-Gray, Ro Robertson and Vanessa da Silva. Two of these artists I collect myself, and all five are doing great things at the moment, getting exposure in institutions.

PS Don’t you agree this selection would make a great salon-style installation in your home?

IN THE GALLERIES:

• Roy Oxlade, Alison Jacques, 23 April - 30 May
  It is not just female artists and artists of colour who were overlooked, and are getting their dues in our current “revisionist” era. Oxlade - longterm husband of Rosie Wylie, an other overlooked artist who just had a great exhibition at the RA - was often seen an “artist’s artist”, teaching many artists in London’s postwar years, but his paintings are as fresh as any artist coming out of art school today (in fact, there are interesting similarities in Olivia Guillot’s paintings - my artwork recommendation this month - see below!)

• Emma Cousin, Blood, Fish and Bone, Niru Ratnam, 24 April - 23 May
  Cousin uses humans bodies in interesting and often absurdist configurations, questioning the ways bodies operate in space. These alterations and augmentations also convey the frightening merging of technology and the body in our current digital age.

  Andrew Cranston, Modern Art, 18 April - 30 May
  Reminiscent of painters like Vuillard and Bonnard, Cranston has a lifelong interest in storytelling through colour and form. His dreamlike visions usually depict domestic interior spaces, with the smaller ones painted directly on hardback book covers, and Cranston excels in exploring all the nuances of a single colour field.
  

ARTWORK OF THE MONTH:

Email me here if you are interested in this or other works by the same artists and I can approach the gallery on your behalf free of charge. I often get a good discount, too.

Are you a seasoned collector and know your way around the art world? As a paid Subscriber to my Substack you will receive further details of the artwork and gallery.

Olivia Guillot

The low humdrum, 2026
Oil on canvas
195 x 155 cm
£7,000 ex vat

Olivia Guillot
The low humdrum, 2026
Oil on canvas
195 x 155 cm
7,000 GBP excl. VAT

Do drop me a comment if you are interested in an artist I share - I like to know what resonates with my subscribers!

Olivia Blinks, in between blinks, is currently on view at Glasshouse, 29 April - 13 June

Gathering opened in Soho in 2022, and I have been impressed with their roster of artists. They recently added Glasshouse as an extended viewing space, with a more experimental program. Olivia Guillot is a 2025–26 resident of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, and her paintings try to convey the subjective and intuitive experience of perception itself, and the way in which looking is never straightforward, but something that involves all the senses, and constantly moves between clarity and dissolution. She has compared painting as similar to dancing: instead of moving to sound frequencies you are dancing with frequencies of colour, texture, rhythm, surface, space and densities of shape and form.

This new Spring season is an especially exciting one for me, as – together with my amazing colleagues, art therapist Zelda Elliott and Mindfulness and Compassion Coach Buse Yildirim – I am officially launching our new social enterprise Artinfusion.

I have never been one for a business plan. A therapist once told me that life is not a pre-designed path, but a web of choices and opportunities, and that sometimes we need to follow a fork in the road and just see where it lands. It helped me make sense of my episodes of depression, which often resulted from life not going the way I had envisaged; the way I told myself that it “should” go. But it is also something I follow in my work. When asked what my five-year plan is I usually draw a blank, but what I can say instead is that I lay out and categorise the different paths that my career could take (usually through my Inbox folders, which for me are the best organisational tool). But after I have done that, I try and follow the flow, and see where my excitement and intuition takes me. And so it was with Artinfusion.

I had been leading some voluntary Zoom sessions for ELATT, a community college in Hackney, which I was connected to through a client of my art tours. Again, I didn’t have a preconceived plan, just a wish and a passion to share great art with others. ELATT’s demographic consists of a large percentage of immigrants and refugees, and my online Zoom sessions and a couple of museum visits were one of the most moving sessions I have led. I especially remember one titled “The Female Gaze”, which had some women in tears; they recognised their own struggles in artworks by Shirin Neshat, Hayv Kahraman, Marina Abramovich, and Alberta Whittle. I also met Zelda and Buse, who were both part of ELATT’s Wellbeing Team, running it on very low cost but with great love and commitment. Something clicked.

In January 2023 we tentatively started on our journey together – three professionals with a love of art and desire to share that love with others, but also three women who intuitively felt a connection to each other. It didn’t come without its obstacles… getting used to each other’s different temperaments and, as a result, differing ways of doing things, having no office space, and trying to do something none of had done before - setting up a creative wellbeing company. It took an entire year to formulate our mission, to the point were the word became forbidden, so many times had we revised it. (The final version, for those interested: Artinfusion is a creative health social enterprise, fusing mindfulness, looking at art, and art therapy. We support teams and community groups by slowing down with the art of today to sustain mental health and reduce the risk of burnout).

But the hard work paid off, and great things started happening. One of my best friends took the plunge and commissioned us for not one, but two workshops with her team at London Business School. The Photographer’s Gallery generously gave us free use of a large, airy studio, where we held a session on ‘Grief through Art’, using the series The Garden by Sian Davey. We recruited a volunteer, who, like Buse and myself had come to the UK from another country, but in her case as a refugee (fitting with one of the core audiences Artinfusion is trying to reach: migrants).

And we started practicing what we preached. We noticed how good it was for us as individuals, but also as a team, to slow down with art, and started incorporating a 20-minute mindful art experience as the start of all our meetings (following the latest research that 20 minutes of engaging with art has a tangible effect on the brain). We do a breathing or movement exercise (led by Buse), we make a drawing and reflect on it together (led by Zelda), or we discuss at an artwork on view in London (led by me). We always note how our mood lifts and our enthusiasm grows after these very manageable, but very rewarding mindful moments.

Personally, something started to happen that surprised me: I really started to enjoy making something with my hands. People often ask me whether I do any art myself, to which I usually reply: “I never make anything, I just talk about great art by others!”, but I will always remember the mini-session where Zelda asked us to draw something after our new volunteer shared her story of coming to the UK, and I found myself reflecting on my own journey, drawing a woman in pain, and bursting into tears. It not made us bond; it also meant that by sharing something painful, I felt lighter.

Beauty - finding the beautiful in everyday life as well as well as in iconic artworks – has always been one of the drives behind my love of art, but another, equally important inspiration started to develop: that art can teach us how to live. I realised that the reason I specialise in contemporary art is not just that I like the new – incredible new materials, exciting new ways of curating – but that contemporary art is made by artists who are alive in the current moment. Contemporary art can show us common struggles, as I experienced in my ELATT sessions, and it can can do something more difficult to pin down: it can hold ambiguity and complexity, something often missing in our polarised 21st century world.

Creative health is one of the most important developments in medical care of the past ten years. I recently attended a conference at St Barts Hospital, The Muse in Medicine, and wrote down what Louise Younie, GP and Professor of Medical Education at Queen Mary University, said. “Art is not just expression, but also meaning-making. Exploring lived experience through the arts extends connection, with the self and the other.” That is what we aim to do at Artinfusion.

So it is with great pleasure that I share Artinfusion’s Spring Membership Programme, running from 7th May until 23rd July (please find a link with option to sign up here). For only £75 per person you will have access to 12 sessions; 9 hours online, 3 in-person museum visits and a creative workshop at our new office co-working space, at the Camden Collective. Why this amazing price? It is a pilot; we are hoping to gather invaluable feedback from participants, which is essential when we apply for funding. The notion of a pilot fits. If art has told us one thing, it is to keep an open mind, experiment and try. I hope you will join us in the journey.

• Laura Lima, The Drawing Drawing, ICA, until 29 March
  I haven’t had this much fun at an exhibition for a long time! Lima is known for choreographing objects and artwork, most notably her Balé Literal series, but here at the ICA she takes the concept one step further. The Drawing Drawing is a life drawing class where everything moves - the model as well as the audience. It was weirdly disorientating, and therefore liberating, too. Yes, Lima’s choreography of the absurd is witty and fun, but she also touches on much deeper concerns; especially the concept of “ornamental philosophy” - a certain spirit of irreverence that you see a lot in Brazilian art (Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Helio Oiticica). It is all about creating abundance with a simple idea when you don’t have a lot of material things.

  
  *Read my interview with Laura Lima here
  

• Rosie Wylie, The Picture Comes First, Royal Academy, until 19 April
  Only the second woman to have an exhibition in the major galleries at the RA after Marina Abramovich in 2023, Wylie’s art career is inspiring. She started painting seriously after raising her children, and only really started to come to the attention of the art world in her seventies, after she was part of a show of under-represented and emerging women artists at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. The art world hasn’t looked back - her bold and irreverent work is on many a collector’s list. Her monumental paintings are funny and touching, inspired by sources as varied as her Nicole Kidman’s dress, Quentin Tarantino films and her Kent countryside.
  

• Klára Hosnedlová, Echo, White Cube, until 29 March
  Not strictly a museum, but a museum-quality show: Hosnedlova’s exhibition is truly spectacular. White Cube’s colossal spaces lend themselves beautifully for Hosnedlova’s immersive installations, combining the urban, the terrestrial and the subterranean. Industrial platforms are overtaken by massive growths in the form of sandstone sculptures and embroidery; giant fragments of bone line the walls. Staging private performances within her elaborate worlds, Czech-born, Berlin-based Hosnedlová carefully documents the movements of a small troupe taking their first, tentative steps in an alien world.

MUSEUM SHOWS OUTSIDE LONDON

• Petrit Halilaj, An Opera out of Time, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, until 31 May

  I first discovered Halilaj during his MET’s 2024 Roof Garden Commission when his giant spider towered over the New York skyline. This was no Maman - Louise Bourgeois’ famous sculpture, nurturing and caring - Halilaj’s creature was wiry and playful, a mischievous smirk on its face. The Kosovar artist has just been announced as the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate. His installations and sculptures are based on childhood drawings, offering fantasy and childhood wonder as metaphors for hope in a world of political turmoil. I think we all need some of that right now.
  

• Claire Tabouret, Weaving Waters, Weaving Gestures, Museum Voorlinden, the Netherlands, until 25 May
  French artist Claire Tabouret has been a favourite of many European and American collectors, most notably Francois Pinault who supported her work early on. Her vibrant portraits in a distinctive palette of muted colours reference art-historical themes while reflecting on human connections and the ways we see ourselves—both as individuals and as part of a collective. Tabouret was given France’s most coveted commission - designing the new stained glass windows of Notre Dame Cathedral (her designs are on show in the Grand Palais in Paris until 15 March, and are planned to be installed by the end of the year).

  

FROM THE GALLERIES:

• Keiji Ito and Elias Saile, Maximillian William, 6 March - 18 April
  I always love a curation of artists of different generations! Especially when it is a pairing of two different media, too. Based in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, Keiji Ito (b. 1935) is both a painter and a ceramicist; his figures are often made with the simplest of means, their eyes and mouths delineated with spare, simple lines. Elias Saile (b. 2001) paints young, androgynous figures with similarly calm, open expressions, using long, narrow canvases in either portrait or landscape orientation, which for the artist reflect the snippets of our memories.
  

• Au Fil du Temps, Artists from the GIRLPOWER Residency, SLQS, 6 March until 11 April
  Last Summer, DamarisAthene, LexiaHachtmann and @Bethany Stead were the lucky recipients of this great residency, founded in 2023 by collector, curator and arts patron together with Zurich-based lawyer and businesswoman Kimberly Morris, and located in a medieval hilltop property in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France. All three UK-based artists are interested in how to find human connections in a constantly changing world, inhabited by biological and artificial bodies, which is a theme close to my heart.
  

• Suzy Cazalet, Tristan Hoare, London, until 20 March
  This gallery has been showing some great artists lately. Cazalet started out as an interior designer, but this exhibition of 14 wall-based tapestries situates her firmly in the art world, too. Seeing no boundaries between the arts, Cazalet is inspired by music, the architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, and the cyclical movement of sun and moon; wind and waves. I really like to meeting of Bauhaus-like design and the flowing rhythms of nature.

FROM THE STUDIO:

Subscribe now

• Andrea Wright
  Compression Fitting (2021/25)
  Coat hanger, Shoulder Pads, Wood Panel, Faux Leather, Leather offcuts, Canvas, Fabric, Safety Pins, Paper, PVA, Clip, Wire
  70 x 42 x 14cm
  £1250,-
  

  Andrea graduated with a BA from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 1994 and embarked on a career in fashion, styling and music working with magazines such as The Face, Arena and Italian Vogue before completing a MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University in 2016. Her background in fashion shows in her handling of soft materials, dressing and draping her sculptures as if they were mannequins. But they also have something formal and geometric, using fashion to address prime concerns of colour, composition, light and shadow. Latex is Wright’s favourite material. She has spoken about being influenced by Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’ and its exploration of the potential of memories in walls and in chambers; the latex skin doesn’t pick up everything, so it’s not an exact replica; more like an impression which allows your mind to imagine the potential of all sorts of things around decay and the passing of time.

  

  
  

My friend, who was born in Singapore and is living there now for the third time in her life, was the perfect guide. She took me around Chinatown, the buzzing neighbourhood that has its origins in 1822, when Singapore was still part of Malaysia. British colonial officer Sir Stamford Raffles allocated the whole area west of the Singapore River a Chinese kampong (community settlement), designating zones for each group with the same provincial origin and dialect. Trade was conducted from pastel-coloured “shophouses”: the shop on the ground floor and the living quarters on top; their front verandas aligned with neighbouring houses forming a continuous walkway. The shophouse architecture is a delightful mix of Chinese and West European architecture: Greek columns, stained-glass windows, ornamental facades, and sculptures of dragons, with brightly-coloured shutters that seem to come straight from a French or Italian country house. (According to a 2024 Financial Times feature, Singapore Shophouses – Hotter than Fifth Avenue?, the shophouses are now amongst some of the world’s most expensive properties).

Another architectural icon are the HDB flats (Housing Development Board flats), public housing blocks dating from 1950s onwards. Each one has a wet and a dry market in the basement, and fixed tables and stools outside on the ground floor, encouraging a spirit of community between residents. This great social premise is clearly still working - I can’t remember visiting a city where so many old people were out and about, shopping and sitting outside together. But the original HDB flats are also interesting aesthetically: no-nonsense white buildings with balconies in simple, primary colours and abstract patterns on their outside walls. Solid and blocky, they look delightfully “retro” between all the swish new skyscrapers with their floating, living plants.

As you suspected, I didn’t just come to see architecture. It was the week of Art Singapore, and we spent most of our time in a stuffy, air-conditioned hall inside one of the three Marina Bays high-rises. The fair was grossly under-advertised - even the building itself didn’t have any flags or posters or signage - but once inside, it looked both familiar (rows and rows of white internal walls and too many clashing artworks) and different (most of the galleries new to me and the more quiet, subtle aesthetics). British and Singapore-based art historian Krystina Lyon, who launched a book at the fair based on her collection of South Asian female artists (You are Seen - soon to be launched in London) said in a recent interview in Forbes that Art Singapore is a welcome addition to the international art scene, as it is covering more artists from the region; Art Basel Hong Kong includes mostly Chinese and North Asian galleries and artists.

The most interesting works, as usual, were to be found with the emerging galleries and in the special projects (here called Platform). Most striking without a doubt was a monumental sculpture by Malaysian artist Anne Samat (b.1973), occupying an entire wall and spreading out over the floor. The artist describes her works as “totemic self -portraits”, and I couldn’t describe this one better: a mix between a giant column and a figure, wearing what looked like a tribal feather headdress but turned out to be made of colourful broom heads. Intricately woven, using traditional Malaysian methods, the entire piece was made of cheap, everyday materials, including keys, wine corks, curtain holders, buckets, and mosquito nets. It was great seeing the audience decipher their humorous applications. Encountering the work, both maximalist in its visuals and minimalist in its precise and repetitive process, felt like witnessing a higher deity, a god or goddess of our current consumerist and plasticised world.

Another excellent Platform presentation was that of Balinese artist Citra Sasmita, who also uses a traditional technique. Two giant scrolls, covered in Kamasan painting from the region of East Bali, were suspended from the ceiling like a tent roof, covering an ornamental carpet with soft floor cushions, When we arrived, Nick Jonas was posing for photographs on one of the cushions; he is said to be introduced to South Asian art by his wife Priyanka Chopra, a passionate collector. Paintings on cowhide covered the flame-coloured walls, featuring female figures with open hands. Sasmita criticises so-called Baliseering—a Dutch colonial policy that manufactured the image of an “authentic” Bali while suppressing Balinese self-determination. Instead she reimagines the lost local mythologies as stories where women take control, as healers, travellers and survivors. I liked my friend’s association with Frida Kahlo; although the context is very different, both artists convey both the beauty and the violations of the female body.

Outside the fair, my favourite artworks were by artists engaging directly with the city of Singapore, making me understand it even better. One of the most beautifully staged exhibitions I have ever seen was an installation of 12 paintings by Singapore artist Dawn Ng (b. 1982) in the unusual location of the Singapore Repertory Theatre, along the scenic Singapore river. Displayed in the dark on what normally would be the stage, installed at different heights, the paintings slowly appeared to us like apparitions. In an interesting talk with London-based curator Jenn Ellis, Ng explained that her colourful abstract compositions are led by the idea of time, something that often feels non-existent in Singapore; both current time (the weather doesn’t change much over the course of a year) and historical time (the houses and playgrounds of her childhood all demolished, replaced with shiny new buildings). Ng inserts pigment in giant ice cubes, carefully building them up layer by layer before letting them slowly melt, directing them into paintings. Her process itself encapsulates the passing of time, each painting inspired by a mood-board of images the artist encountered in that month, but there is deep time, too: the ice cube melting, its swirling layers of pigment like strata from an ancient, colourful soil.

The other work was in Singapore Art Museum, one of the more edgier buildings in the city, situated in an old car park (with an edgy crowd to match). I had seen Chinese artist Cui Jie’s (b. 1983) paintings before at her London gallery Pilar Corrias, but somehow they always struck me as a little clinical. This one was different. Almost the size of a mural, Thermal Landscapes takes as its starting point Singapore’s watchtowers, built in the 1960s and 70s as vantage points and used to show off the rapidly evolving cityscape to potential foreign investors. Jie skilfully blends animal and human shapes into her towers, inspired by kitschy ornamental statues that used to adorn mid-20th century homes, mixing the utopian and the sentimental. The seven blended towers look shiny and futuristic but at the same time somewhat blurry, like a distant memory or dream. Their beautiful mirroring in the painting’s ocean-like, blue background suggests the flow of the city, from the shophouses and HDB flats in Chinatown to the slick Marina Bay towers where Art Singapore was held. Holding onto time.

An aside:
All my favourites are female artists…. Is this because I am a woman myself? Or is the most exciting art at the moment being created by female artists? You decide.

For this month only, I include a free trial with access to my previous posts.
Why don’t you see if you like my selections? For £8 per month (cancel anytime) or £80 per year you will get monthly lists of 5 artworks for sale in all ranges under 15K, with short blurbs from me, so you can start to get to know the artists. Most are emerging artists based in London with very promising careers.

If you would like to receive a broader selection of artwork customised to your wishes, we can work together for the best fit for you, for a small fee. Email me here for Art Advisory services.

I hope to welcome you as a new subscriber!

PREVIEW JANUARY 2026
A very exciting month - all the artists are in my Favourites list!

Read more

January is usually a month of restraint, so instead of the 3 paid and 3 free exhibitions in London, this month all my London recommendations are free. And if the weather stays this wet, why not plan a cheeky trip to Rome, where you can have your Negroni in the most magical artist-designed bar?

Closing soon:

· Noémie Goudal, The Story of Fixity, Artangel, Borough Yards, extended until 25 January
Artangel is known for its ambitious art installations in unusual spaces, and Goudal is one of one of Europe’s most promising young artists. Her photographs play with perception and spatiality, so that real landscapes merge with staged ones in intricate photographs and films. Here under the arches of Borough Market, Goudal uses three screens that pair cycles of water with cycles of day and night; the works magically start to leak and drip into the surrounding space.

Opening soon:

· Mark Manders, Room with All Existing Words, London Mithraeum, opening 22 January until 4 July
Another great exhibition space, and a suitable pairing: Manders’ sculptures and installations are as mysterious as the Roman temple undergound. Manders’ work is both monumental and intimate, a continuous pondering on what it is to be human and move through time. His giant, half-finished bronze heads give you the feeling of having stumbled upon art that seems at once to have been always there, and abandoned by the artist just an hour ago.
Watch my video interview with the artist here

· New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, opening 30 January
This is the best way to discover emerging artists in the UK! This year, 26 artists were selected through an open call by Pio Abad, Louise Giovanelli and Grace Ndiritu. Their work engages with the most current themes: dystopian futures; critical responses to the climate crisis, gentrification, experiences of displacement and systems of power. But do not despair! Last year there was a lot of humour, too, with many artworks satirising the wellbeing industry.

Just Opened:

• Condo London, 17 January until 14 February

This is such a great annual event – an international exchange of galleries, whereby London’s smaller and medium-sized galleries host visiting galleries from all over the work, either co-curating an exhibition together, or allocating spaces. Kate MacGarry, Sunday Painter and Ginny on Frederick look great, but the other presentations all feature artists that are new to me. And that, of course, is the point.

• Nat Faulkner, Strong Water, Camden Art Centre, until 22 March
  Faulkner won the Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Award at Frieze in 2024 with his exciting photographic and sculptural work that uses the unpredictability of the dark room as his process, subject and collaborator. Faulkner’s work references techniques of the past, but the way he samples different techniques is firmly rooted in the 21^st century. Faulkner uses the magic of the photographic process itself, but another sense of magic evolves when experiencing his works that are never fully fixed.
  Watch my video interview with the artist here

  

• Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Gagosian Davies Street until 21 March
  Remember the 70s and 80s? Yours were probably a little less wild than those of the night owls in Goldin’s photographs, captured at clubs, bars and at home in Boston. Goldin’s subjects refuse to fit the prescribed categories of a capitalist society; she manages, without judgment, to convey both the seduction of the night and the rawness and despair of addiction. This is a unique chance to see all 126 photographs from the titular photobook, created between 1973 and 1986.

3x OUTSIDE LONDON:

• Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, Pirelli HangarBiocca Milan until 15 February, and Grand Palais, Paris from 18 March until 21 June
  This is Goldin’s year! Goldin is the only artist whose work made me cry: I saw Sirens and Memory Lost in London at Marian Goodman Gallery in 2019, and went back 3 times. Goldin describes her slideshows as “films made up of stills”, and on paper they sound amateurish, but her great sense of mood, and her use of a haunting musical score render them magnetic, pulsating with energy and humanity. They touch on universal themes of longing, loss and connection.

  

• Clemetine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page, Villa Lontana Bar, Rome until 18 March
  Keith-Roach, a sculptor inspired by archaeology and ruins, and Page, a painter working with illusion and light, are a duo in real life, and often exhibit together, their work enhanced by that of the other. But this bar is on another level! Renovated by Studio Strato, this is the new Trastevere location of this non-profit project space, dedicated to exploring the intersections of ancient and contemporary art. I am seriously considering travelling to Rome just to have a Negroni in this dreamlike space…

  

• Erasure, Goodwood Art Foundation: Laís Amaral, Solange Pessoa and Dana Awartani, until Spring
  This great new space opened in last year and is located on the historic Goodwood Estate in West Sussex. Artworks are chosen in dialogue with the landscaped gardens. The current exhibition brings together three female artists: two Brazilian artists from different generations, as well as Palestinian Saudi artist, who embrace craft as a way of staying connected to cultural traditions; meditative works that at the same time expose the slow destruction of the natural environment. There are new sculptures in the gardens, too.

I would love to help you in your purchase, approach the gallery or artist on your behalf, and make sure you get the best price. If you would like to receive a broader selection of artwork customised to your wishes, we can work together. Please email me here for Art Advisory services.

This month’s selection!

To see details, my blurbs and price, why not consider becoming a paid subscriber?
For only £8 per month you will receive 5 artworks under 15K in your inbox every month - a great tool to start or grow your collection.

Read more

3 x FREE IN LONDON:

• The Medium is the Message, College of Psychic Studies (South Kensington), until 31 January
  This is probably not a venue you visit every day! The College is hosting a rich and thought-provoking exhibition, curated by Jacqui McIntosh (who happens to be married to artist Marcus Cope, whose exhibition I featured in my 3x3x3 September). The work is spread out over four floors of the historic building, and engages with themes of spirit communication, ancestral memory, and the energies of the body, Earth, and unseen realms. It includes newly acquired works (Ithell Colquhoun, Ann Churchill, and Anna Mary Howitt Watts amongst others), shown in dialogue with works by contemporary artists (including Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and Chantal Powell). This is also the UK debut of American artist and visionary Pauline Peavy (1901-1990), whose work was shown at Emanuela Campoli in Paris earlier this year.

• Beatriz Milhazes, Além do Horizonte, White Cube Mason’s Yard, until 17 January 2026
  This is by far the most colourful and uplifting exhibition in London right now, with a beautiful mural using Milhazes’ trademark pattern and ornament. Building on her presentation for the 2024 Venice Biennale, the exhibition at Mason’s Yard brings together Milhazes’ new paintings, collages and a site-specific installation, in which she draw on her archive of textile and decorative sources. Inspired by the psychedelia of mid-20th-century print culture, indigenous Brazilian and European design, Milhazes makes decorative art take on architectural dimensions.

• Cathie Pilkington, Housekeeper, Freud Museum, until 1 March 2026
  Freud Museum has hosted interesting art interventions for a while now, but they tend to be irregular and therefore easy to miss. That may change, as the museum has appointed its first Academic Associate: Gemma Blackshaw, Professor of Art History at the RCA, who guest-curated this show. Royal Academician (and recent fellow of the British School at Rome), Cathie Pilkington is the perfect artist for Freud’s mansion, her sculptures often playing with ideas of the uncanny. Working with the idea of the museum as a household, Pilkington channels the figure of Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s live-in housekeeper, using her daily routines as their own forms of creativity and agency.

3 x PAID IN LONDON:

• Encounters Giacometti: Mona Hatoum, Barbican, until 11 January
  A great exhibition in just one large room, this iteration of three encounters with Giacometti over a period of almost a year is brilliant (the last one, juxtaposing his work with Huma Bhabha, got mixed reviews and fell a little flat). It is interesting to see how many themes Giacometti and Hatoum had in common: the absurd and surreal, the domestic, the hostility in the everyday and…. cages. Displaying Giacometti’s sculpture of a nose in Hatoum’s cage is the bravest curatorial gesture I have seen in a while! Note that Tate Modern also has a beautifully atmospheric display of Giacometti sculptures in the Tanks.

• Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern, until 11 January
  Tate Modern has highlighted indigenous artists for some time now, in its exhibitions, acquisitions, and temporary displays, and Kam Kngwarray was one of Australia’s greatest Aboriginal artists. She started painting seriously only aged 70 (she died in 1996 aged 86) and the exhibition, co-created with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) is a true celebration of a life, a place and the people she was surrounded by. Large installations of batik and colourful paintings all embody the spirit of “country” - the Ancestral lands, Alhalker, located in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory. Meditative and enthralling.

• Peter Doig, House of Music, Serpentine Gallery, until 8 February
  Doig left Michael Werner Gallery in 2023 to “go it alone” and his work is as strong as ever, with rave reviews from ever publication in the art world. The exhibition brings together recent paintings and, for the first time, integrates sound into his work. Transforming the gallery into a listening space, the exhibition features two sets of rare, restored analogue speakers, originally designed for cinemas and large auditoriums. Doig selected music from his archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes, and each painting in the exhibition engages with music in a different way: some depict spaces where music is played or heard, others show musicians performing or people dancing.

3 x OUTSIDE LONDON:

• Kira Freije, Unspeak the Chorus, Hepworth Wakefield, until 4 May 2026
  Kira Freije’s (b. 1985, London) first UK solo exhibition has just opened at The Hepworth Wakefield (after which it travels to Modern Art Oxford), and it comprises around 20 life-size figures arranged in small groupings. Freije’s sculptures consist of metal frames, bent and twisted, with hands and feet casts from the artist’s own. Freije then adds parts of face casts, textiles and found materials added to bring her creatures alive, at once familar and otherworldy.

  The audience is invited to walk along the groupings, and atmospheric lighting design and hand-blown glass lamps increase the strong emotional charge.

• Nour Jaouda, Matters of Time, Spike Island, Bristol until 11 January
  Nour Jaouda (b.1997, Libya) makes collaged works that combine textiles, painting, and sculptural elements, combined in a slow and meditative process. Fabrics and treated and dyed with earthy, saturated pigments, then cut out and rebuilt layer upon layer. For the artist, the process of material construction and deconstruction mirrors the way in which cultural identity is formed: the uprooting and rooting a constant process of becoming. The imagery is lush and earthy, inspired by Jaouda’s childhood in Libya and her experiences of living between Cairo and London.

• Harold Offeh: Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It could Be Sweet, Kettle’s Yard, until 1 March 2026
  Like me, you may have encountered Ghanaian-born (1977), London-based Harold Offeh’s work in group shows, or attended a performance, but this is the first time to see many of his works together in the UK. His playful, provocative performance and video works, often using aesthetics taken from pop culture and more recently, Afrofuturism, interrogate our acceptance of political, class, gender and racial models in society. New participatory elements will activate Kettle’s Yard’s galleries, uniting artist, collaborators and audiences.

The press preview was similar to those I have attended in the UK: a private tour from the curator, the artist present for a few personal words, but admittedly it was little more exciting arriving in Brooklyn with the ferry, the famous New York skyline in my mind’s eye, than it was taking the Northern Line to Tate Modern. But not just that – New York’s high-rise buildings and highways connecting the peninsula of Manhattan to the mainland had an interesting similarity to Kim’s Seoul, the backdrop of her video installations about a female delivery driver seeking connection and transcendence in the cold, lonely world of the gig economy where optimisation is key.

While I loved the show for the most part (watch out for my upcoming exhibition review at Studio International) it also left me terrified, especially Kim’s two later films in the trilogy which include generative AI (her films also include life footage, animation and video game simulation). It felt as if my brain could not fully comprehend what I saw in front of me, trying to latch on to familiar settings (a rocky landscape, a building) only to be blown away by the artifice of it all: people floating through space like astronauts, giant bioluminescent insects made of electronic parts, strange clocks bending over a barren plane. Not surprisingly, it was when Kim managed to seamlessly fold the digital into the real, in the story of her female delivery driver racing through the deserted city, that I was most captivated, her visuals serving and enhancing a larger, human story that was relatable.

Amant, a new space for me (also in Brooklyn, founded in 2019), is also showing three video installations around the theme of AI, by Tokyo- and Shanghai-based Lu Yang. I am not an expert on digital imagery (my art history degrees didn’t include this new medium!) but I could see that Yang’s images are materially more complex than those of Ayoung Kim. In front of my eyes, landscapes transformed into monsters transformed into human organs transformed into artworks, while the artist’s avatar DOKU gives a philosophical commentary. Yang’s films are based on lessons from Madhyamaka Buddhism, which posits that all phenomena are void of inherent essence. “We are born alone and we die alone….the self is a phantom,” says the voice-over. Yang’s images change at such speed and are of such high definition that the films left me physically sick, as if the whole world was presented to me at once. And yet, like like some disaster tourist, I couldn’t look away, and I was happy to be released by my husband’s phone call. Where Kim’s triptych of video works had a story, Yang’s was non-linear and non-narrative, leaving just sequences of imagery: the horror, the abject, the grotesque.

At dinner that night my friend and I talked about AI; we are both extremely worried. She is a medical researcher and considers AI from a biological angle, arguing that AI challenges the main principle of evolution, the survival of the biological species. By creating entities that evolve faster than us, we may evolve into something that will ultimately destroy us. When measured in adults, use of AI is making our brains less active, my friend told me, and we are about to witness the first generation who is growing up with AI. For my part, what mostly frightens me about AI comes from an ethical perspective: if language is shuffled like the pieces of a puzzle, language’s ability to express the specific and idiosyncratic will become eroded. I fear a world where we are all expressing ourselves in generics.

Not less scary is that, because of its broad dig, AI inherently creates language that is factually or scientifically untrue. This is what John Thornhill argues, in a very enlightening feature in the Financial Times of 13 September 2025, Bot or Not. “Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed. The generative AI models that run the chatbots are probalistic machines that generate the most plausible, not the most accurate answer. They operate by statistical correlation rather than empirical observation,” Thornhill writes. “The Enlightenment was all about rationality; AI takes us back to the area of superstition.” The solution? Thornhill offers a provocative one, proposed earlier by Oxford Internet Institute’s researchers: in order to avoid “careless speech”, generative AI models should have a legal duty to tell the truth, just as lawyers, advertisers and doctors are obliged to in their professional codes.

People like John Thornhill and Ayoung Kim give me hope: because they think deeply about AI, not just seeing it as optimisation, but exploring ways for us humans to use it to our advantage, to create a better, more beautiful world. Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer Sphere really moved me, with its two lonely female delivery drivers, experiencing brief moments of love and kinship in a multiverse where time is fluid. As Lisa Crohn argued in her 2014 book, Wired for Story, the human brain is wired for narrative, and by extension, for meaning.

I am writing this on my way back from the Folkstone Literary Festival, where I attended a great session by , who writes about the freelance life (I can really recommend her 2022 book The Pyama Myth). Inevitably the question was posed to Meades-Williams what she thinks of AI. She didn’t skip a beat. "Stories have heart; AI is just a shortcut. Getting it wrong and then using your brain to solve it: that is what makes good writing,” she said. “I want to play around with the words until something changes in me.”

With a slight delay due to a visit to see the Fra Angelico exhibition in Florence, please find below my top 10 artworks to purchase and/or artists to keep an eye on from Frieze London this year. I …

Read more

I get sent many previews, and I am a starting collector myself – all my artworks have been under 10K and I have bought some great ones under 1K, too! I want to make the best of what I see available to you, too.
Why don’t you see if you like my selections? For £8 per month (cancel anytime) or £80 per year you will get monthly lists of 5 artworks for sale in all ranges under 15K, with short blurbs from me, so you can start to get to know the artists. Most are emerging artists based in London with very promising careers.

If you would like to receive a broader selection of artwork customised to your wishes, we can work together for the best fit for you, for a small fee. Email me here for Art Advisory services.

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL PRICES EXCLUDE VAT

• Charlotte Winifred Guérard
  FACING AWAY, COMPOSITION 15 REPLICA, 2024
  Oil and acrylic on canvas
  208 x 178 cm
  £6,000

  

  A chance to get a striking painting by an up-and-coming artist. Guérard, French but based in London, recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts Schools and she won the 2020 Freelands Foundation Painting Prize. She likes to challenge the way in which paintings are displayed, often mounting them on interesting constructions such as the sails of a boat or mobile steel panels that act like screens. Her paintings are influenced by the landscapes and everyday scenes that surround her, blended with memories, to suggest places and feelings that are fluid and ambiguous, like life itself.

• Lydia Goldblatt
  Bone, Flame, Folds, 2020-2023
  C-Type photographic hand print
  First 2: 45.7 x 45.7 cm, last one: 55.9 x 55.9cm
  Edition of 5 + 2AP
  First 2: £ 1,900, last one: £2,500

  

  

  

I first saw Goldblatt’s series Fugue at Photo London last year, and the vulnerability and intimacy of these photographs blew me away. The works are shown this month at Photo Oxford and I have included three which I believe are great together (there are many more). These are visually stunning images from a skilled photographer (Goldblatt regularly photographs for newspapers and magazines) The lighting recalls Old Master paintings, but they also made me think of Berthe Morisot’s painting The Cradle from 1872, revealing underlying themes of motherhood with its precarious balance of love and care with boredom and anxiety. Goldblatt’s giving us a 21^st version of motherhood that shows that everything and nothing has changed.
@lydiagoldblatt

• Renata Hegyi
  Caretaker’s hat, 2023-24
  Oil on canvas
  40 x 50 cm
  £1,500

  

Hegyi’s paintings are created from observation and gradually incorporate imaginary elements; she draws inspiration from a diverse range of art forms, including literature and short stories. These mostly small and medium-sized paintings slowly grow on you, seducing you with everyday still life compositions that are quirky and bright, but often revealing something mysterious and symbolic. With titles that hint at double-entendres, Hegyi’s paintings are witty, but also offer an intriguing interplay of identity and perception through the essence of objects. Hegyi is an alumna of Royal Academy Schools and based in London.

• Matt Phillips
  Untitled, 2025
  Pigment and silica on canvas
  142.2 x 111.8cm
  £ 9,000

  

  The Fores Project, a residency for painters which also operates as a gallery was established a few years ago by Sophie Sofer, an artist and collector herself, and a friend of mine. Situated in a lovely house in Kentish Town, it offers a more intimate and direct way to view art, in the artist’s (temporary) studio, with the artist present. Brooklyn-based Matt Phillips was one of my favourites from the many artists they have hosted so far, for his intriguing language of abstraction, his original use of materials and his great control of colour. At once constructivist and dreamy, the works defy easy explanations and have a spiritual feel when seen in the flesh. I particularly like this work as it hints at a figure about to jump or dive.

• Zoe Spowage
  The Baby and the Bathwater, 2023

  Conte pastel, acrylic and dye on canvas
  152 x 97 cm
  General Assembly gallery

  

  To stay with the theme of motherhood, Spowage’s painting is a very different interpretation of it than Lydia Goldblatt’s: whimsical and surreal. Spowage’s gestures are wild, energetic, and deliberately unstable, and her characters upend expectations of beauty or coherence, caught between chaos and control, between surface and identity. Zoe Spowage is a graduate of Falmouth University and has been Shortlisted for the British Women Artists prize 2018.

This month I have so many great exhibitions to share that it may be hard to choose! But fortunately most of these are open for some time.

3 x FREE IN LONDON:

• Whitechapel gallery: Candice Lin, g/hosti until 1 March 2026

Candice Lin’s installation is incredibly rich in detail. Her cardboard maze at first glance looks like a magical forest but soon turns into something more sinister, with phone screens suspended between the foliage showing scenes of violence, and animals displaying their savagery. American-born, LA based Lin was commissioned to make the work during university protests and the recent fires in her community in LA, but the installation transcends the local and the specific. What Lin’s labyrinth-like form so powerfully conveys is that there is no way to hide for us humans.

*** Why not join my group tour on Wednesday 26^th November, 4.30-6pm?
Details here ***

• White Cube Bermondsey: Cai Guo-Ciang, Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015-2025, until 9 November
  The artist just orchestrated a spectacular firework display on the façade of the Centre Pompidou for the opening of Art Basel, bringing the risky and dangerous experimentation with gunpowder into the realms of contemporary art. His resulting paintings move between figurative and abstract, and connect Western concerns of abstraction with Eastern philosophical thought. Notions of creation and deconstruction and of control and chance speak to the rhythms of our cosmos.

• Josh Lilley gallery: Rember Yahuarcani, Here Lives the Origin, until 20 November 2025
  I discovered the artist from Peru at the last Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, where his monumental but intricate paintings on bark were beautifully installed opposite those of his father, Santiago, who has his own public exhibition at the Whitworth Manchester (see below). Both belong to the Aimeni (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia, and Rember’s luminous paintings on a black background convey a rich world populated by insect-like figures that balance precariously on tree branches and seem to be brimming with the music of the natural world.

3 x PAID IN LONDON:

• Royal Academy: Kerry James Marshall, The Histories, until 18 January 2026
  So irreverent yet so art-historically significant, at once witty and with gravitas, Marshall engages with black histories subtly and powerfully. He is one of the great artists, who took from the rich art histories that preceded him and who is so influential on the histories that come after. His painting School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) in the last room has one of my favourite image ever: two toddlers like putti admiring a Disney princes positioned like the skull in Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors.

• Courtauld Gallery: Wayne Thiebaud, American Still Life, until 18 January 2026
  Thiebaud describes his still lifes as ‘small landscapes, buildings or characters in a play with costumes’. The paintings are so textured, so lush that they just make you want to touch, lick or eat the cakes and the candied fruit and the sweets. Thiebaud trained as a sign painter and that directness still shows, but his objects of consumerism are more complex and mysterious than that. The sweet jars miss handles so the consumer is stuck in their desire; the sausage and cheese counter was inspired by Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergere - both paintings putting you right at the counter.

• Whitechapel Gallery: Joy Gregory, Catching Flies with Honey, until 1 March 2026
  Another one at the Whitechapel, to combine with Candice Lin. This will be the first major survey of the artist spanning four decades. Gregory is one of the UK’s most innovative artists working in photography, and her works are as much concerned with questions of identity, race and gender as with the craft of photography itself. Working often in series, and with historic photographic processes, this is an exhibition that requires time and close looking, so perfect as an antidote to all that art flashing by on Instagram. I loved the artful photographs of clothes standing in for human personality traits and background!

3 x OUTSIDE LONDON:

• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh: Andy Goldsworthy, Fifty Years, until 2 November
  Conceived by the artist as a single, immersive artwork in response to the space, this is a unique chance to see Goldsworthy’s new and past artworks in an exhibition, as his art is usually made directly in nature. Much of contemporary art is concerned with nature in the context of climate change and Indigenous practices, but Goldsworthy’s art lets you feel the everyday beauty of nature and our connection to it without becoming preachy. Unfortunately I have to give this one a miss, as I will be travelling to exhibition nr 3 in Florence.

• Whitworth Manchester: Santiago Yahuarcani, The Beginning of Knowledge, until 4 January 2026
  I discovered the artist from Peru at the last Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, where Santiago’s monumental but intricate paintings on bark were beautifully installed opposite those his son, Rember. Both belong to the Aimeni (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia and Santiago’s paintings, while carrying references to colonial violence, also have their own unique visual vocabular of ancestral symbols, medicinal plants and Amazonian stories of life’s origins. Tate acquired a large painting on bark at Frieze London in 2023, so it is fitting that his first international solo show is around the same time, and in the UK.

• Palazzo Strozzi, Florence: Fra Angelico until 25 January 2026
  A once-in-a-generation exhibition of arguably the most spiritual of the Renaissance painters brings together over 140 religious scenes, amongst which seven major altarpieces whose individual elements were dispersed over time. “Assembling this many Fra Angelicos is almost a miracle,” wrote the New York Times, of curator Carl Brandon Strehlke’s incredible achievement. San Marco shows the artist’s illuminated manuscripts and his paintings in the cells of the Dominican monks, while the more substantial eight rooms in the Palazzo Strozzi show his religious paintings and altarpieces. The angelic friar (“beato angelico”) is often considered as much a saint as an artist, but these two exhibitions place him firmly in his time, working with the Medici family and experimenting with both gothic and renaissance styles.
  
  

I am diverging. Finishing such a long and intense process was incredibly rewarding, and I made certain to mark the moment, telling my family and friends and posting some memories of the journey on Instagram. It also made me think about the notion of “success”. The same week I finished my book (was, in fact in the middle of that last, seventh draft – the comma’s and the spelling and the grammar draft), I met up with a friend from my Master’s program in Contemporary art – we were both at Christie’s Education in 2011/12. We hadn’t really kept in touch except through Instagram, and I knew that she had recently started as head of Contemporary Art at the auction house Bonham’s. I always loved seeing her dance videos on Instagram – professional level in my eyes – and her shots of standing in the auction house next to an amazing artwork with a phone glued to her ear.

Having updated my former classmate of my recent activities, amongst which, the book, I said, ‘But what about you? You are clearly the success story of our Master’s program!’ to which, without skipping a beat, she replied ‘What do you define by success?’ I could see why she has the career that she does – bouncing my question back to me was both sharp and charming – but it also kept me thinking about success for the rest of the week. Why was it that I defined being head of sales at an auction house (and being a striking dancer) as the highest form of professional achievement? What made me see it as more successful than, say, freelancing, trying out different jobs, following the flow of what excites you, raising two children, spending a few years abroad, writing a book (while being half decent at tennis and still not managing that forward bend at yoga)?

At dinner that week with two close friends, all three of us Dutchie’s stranded in London around twenty years ago, I told them about my meeting with my former classmate. One of my friends retrained as a teacher around five years ago, and has been working at a girl’s school in Harlesden, first as a teacher for the non-English speaking class (children of all ages from war-torn countries) - in which she became so good that other, more senior teachers started to drop in in her classes - and then as head of A-level Politics. Her subject was History, however, and she had been covering a maternity cover as head of History, which she also did brilliantly, but her cover was coming to an end. She told us that she regretted that, yet at the same time if she really asked herself what she liked doing, the answer was pretty much what she was doing now, with or without the maternity cover - research, taking students on extra trips, having time for students’ personal development. ‘I felt myself losing at a race I didn’t even want to enter,’ she said.

Everyday life in the 21^st century does often feel like a race, and it isn’t surprising: my generation (and I assume many generations before and after) were brought up with that arc of success, usually defined by the job you did and how much you progressed in that (read: got to a senior level). But going back to my former classmate at Bonhams, she told me that, yes, of course her job was amazing and she loved working with artworks every day, and growing professionally, but it was also intense and demanding and not always ideal with a three-year old at home. Another close friend has a senior role at an educational college, and whenever we finish our regular Friday breakfasts at Watch House, and I head off to a gallery, followed by some quiet writing, then walking the dog while it is still light, she says she envies me. Of course my life isn’t always this nice; freelancing is also tough and lonely and frustrating, and most of this year I felt ready to enter the payroll again. But it makes the same point: that success can be interpreted differently. Or, as my other Dutch friend said during dinner, ‘you could also ask yourself if what we want in life is “success” in the first place.’

On Monday, after my cold swim in the Parliament Hill lido, I met another friend for coffee (yes, while writing this I do admit that my work week looks rather nice), who told me about a book she had just read, Good Things by Samin Nosrat, which is a cook book/ philosophy book/ love letter to the joy of cooking and sharing meals. My friend is an expert on dark chocolate from around the world and makes her own Kimchee, and it is always a delight to eat dinner at her place. Samin Nosrat writes about the things that make up “a good life”, which I paraphrase here: a community you connect with, sharing joyful things, and making the world a little bit of a kinder place to live in. ‘Yes!’ I said to my friend (while typing the name of the book into the list of reminders on my iPhone, a list that easily matches 1000 entries, all those things I want to read and do whenever I have retired from my “successful professional life”).

Maybe instead of “success” we can talk about “a good life”.

After all, people on their death bed are not very likely to remember all the jobs they had; they are so much more likely to reminisce about their loves and their friendships and those small moments of joy, when you see your child ride their first bike, when you find the perfect little lunch place on holiday and stay there with friends until it gets dark, when you are the first compassionate and caring stranger a refugee meets in a new country, when you share the last chocolate you bought on an impromptu trip to Paris. And yes, for me and my former classmate at Bonhams: that moment of transcendence, when you stand in front of an artwork and find yourself mesmerised, forgetting everything around you. When your salary or status or achievement or progress disappear as fast as the daylight in October, and all that matters for that brief, intense moment is that absolute feast of colour and form and meaning in front of you. When you find yourself transformed.

If you want to purchase any of these works through me, I would be very grateful, and I will most likely be able to get you the best price, as I know the artists and galleries. I can also help you with a more thorough selection and advise you on all artists and price ranges in the (London) market for an advisory fee. For now I will also include the gallery and artist’s Instagram page, as I am still trying out the best format for this.

And, for those of you who know me, I have an interest in and connections with many female artists, but am also including male and non-binary artists; it just happens to be an all-female list this month. Also, taste is subjective, and art is not a competition. The order of my top 5 is alphabetical.

• Emi Avora
  Stories of Loneliness and Love, 2025
  120 x100 cm
  Acrylic and oil on canvas
  Price on Application

Born in Greece and currently based in Singapore, Emi Avora just won the ‘Women Art Prize Overseas’ last week for her colourful paintings. Their apparent flatness hides a depth of symbolism and emotion, and Avora creates the perfect balance between pattern and outline. From her everyday observation, Avora’s paintings are also portals to a space of dreaming, where paradoxical things happen, where there is a sense of euphoria but also of anxiety at times, where things are simultaneously disorienting and dazzling.

• Kavitha Balasingham
  brb’, 2024
  MDF, car filler, acrylic paint, milli put, plasticine, resin, nylon flock, LCD, Arduino nano, cables, plug..
  60 x 50 x 11 cm
  £ 2,250.00

  

  Much of Kavitha Balasingham’s work is concerned with the Western gaze of Sri Lanka: as an idyllic island, exoticised for consumption. Her witty and playful sculptures usually have something digital embedded in them, and on a deeper level Balasingham’s work is concerned with our sense for longing and connection. Her latest show ‘Love Island’ perfectly captures these themes.

• Lana Locke
  Sweet Desert Artichoke, 2025
  Unique, aluminium direct burnout
  59 x 12 x12 cm
  £2,500

  

  I first encountered Lana Locke through her film Journeys of a Laundry Mountain, which cleverly and tenderly combined motherhood, the domestic and climate change. Her sculptures arise from the same themes, embracing the unknown and the messy, and hinting at care: for our plants, our lands, others. She recently completed a 6-months residency at Camberwell Space. There is a great film, too, and the sculptures and film are part of a series of work looking at climate emergencies, the female body and use of sustainable materials.

• Alicia Paz
  1. Crystal Slipper, 2023
  Genuine goldleaf (22 karat) on Formlabs grey resin, 3d printed sculpture
  18.5 x 6.5 x 11 cm
  One of three artist proofs of an edition of ten
  £2000

  2.Derbyshire Weeds, 2022
  Photogram on Ilford satin paper

  Framed, 30 x 24.5 cm
  £2,000
  3. Presence, 2023
  Photogram on Ilford satin paper
  Framed, 30 x 24.5 cm
  £2,000

  

  

  Paz made the works after a residency at Chatsworth House and was inspired by the historic Devonshire collections. Her photographs, prints, sculptures and textiles can be combined into different installations, so I decided to share three works that I think would be great together. A central theme in Paz’s work is the role of women in history and the way they expressed themselves through fashion, created beautiful objects, or practiced science or literature or other academic pursuits.

• Anna Perach
  Spilling, 2023
  Watercolour and marker on paper
  30 x 41 cm
  £1,200

Anna Perach has been making strides in the art world, with a prolific output of performances and exhibitions in the last few years. Perach creates incredible performances and sculptures made of her trademark material, tufted fabric. She is interested in the feminine, mythology and the dark desires and fears that are so human but often hidden. This work is related to her great performance and exhibition ‘Holes’ at Gasworks in 2024.

Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections, 2018 (detail of instagram performance series) ‘Virtual Beauty’, Somerset House

3 x FREE IN LONDON:

• Virtual Beauty, Somerset House until 28 September (suggested donation £5,- so practically free)
  This is a theme close to my heart: the impact of continued digitalisation on our lives. How do we stay grounded in a hyperconnected world? Where do we find connection? Featuring over 20 international artists, this exhibition into the influence of artificial intelligence, social media, and virtual identities on self-image. In the post-internet era, Are we the Gods of our own image?
  
  *** Why not join my group tour on Wednesday 24^th September, 4.30-6pm?
  Details here ***
  

• Wellcome Photography Prize 2025, Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Road, London NW1 1AT
  With images submitted from over 100 countries, a judging panel has selected the top 25 entries across three categories: ‘Striking Solo Photography’, ‘The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging’ and a Storytelling Series. The exhibition – like medicine itself – find the local in the global; there are several indigenous photographers with powerful images relating to climate change and disappearing communities.

• Marcus Cope, Bomb Factory: 19^th- 23^rd September, 10am-6pm, PV Friday 19^th Sep, 6-8pm
  Just on for a few days, but I have followed Marcus Cope’s work for a while and his paintings are great: intriguing and otherworldly, yet also realistic and recognisable.

3 x PAID IN LONDON:

• Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern, 17 September until 12 April
  For the last ten years or so, Tate Modern has gone ‘revisionist’: emphasising overlooked female artists, indigenous artists and themes of identity and ecology. That meant that some of the works traditionally seen as ‘masterpieces’ in the collection, such as Picasso’s Three Dancers, were not on display. In this exhibition that work takes centre stage, together with all the Picasso works in the Tate collection, to explore the theme of performance and transformation in Picasso’s work, as well as his fascination with everything to do with theatre.
  

• Tate: Do Ho Suh, Walk The House, extended until 26 October
  Feautures Do Ho Suh’s polyester installations with architectural details of the houses where he lived, and a brilliant new ‘fantasy house’: a white polyster room with doorknobs and light switches are floating around like birds in an avary, as well as paper rubbings of his childhood home in South Korea and beautiful films.
  Would have been better with a higher ceiling, but definitely worth seeing, and his works are highly photogenic!
  

• Tate Britain: Ithell Colquhoun, until 19 October
  Surrealism has a real moment, with the amazing centenary exhibition Surrealism at Centre Pompidou last year, and the rediscovery of overlooked artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar and Ithell Colquhoun. The best way I can describe Colquhoun’s works is ‘Georgia O’Keeffe on hallucinogenic drugs’: sensualist with deep hues and strange objects. Born in India to British parents and raised in Cheltenham, Colquhoun was inspired by a range of spiritual traditions as well as modern occultism.

3 x OUTSIDE LONDON:

• ‘Commodities’: Sculptures and Ceramics by Rene So at Compton Verney, 20 September - 8 March 2026
  So's ceramics and textiles (bearded men, boots, odd vessels) look like the iconography of a secret society, but in fact So is inspired by different cultures throughout the world and throughout time. She is equally drawn to art, design and furniture and her works often blur these categories. For this exhibition she will show darkly playful ceramic sculptures which consider how we understand Chinese culture and history today.

• Helen Chadwick II Caroline Walker, Hepworth Wakefield, until 26 October
  Two Concurrent exhibitions by two female artists of different generations (Chadwick unfortunately died very young). Where Chadwick’s work is sculptural as well as openly and loudly feminist (I will never forget her ‘Piss Flowers’!) Walker’s paintings are more conventional in style, but her feminist stance is in the subject matter. She renders women in traditionally female spaces like nurseries, kitchens and gardens on monumental canvases, like altarpieces for the domestic.
  

• Sophie Barber, Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry, Hastings Contemporary, 27 September 2025 - 15 March 2026

  A new exhibition of Sophie Barber’s work, the first in her hometown of Hastings. Barber plays with the sculptural qualities of paint through giant, heavy works, stretching over the floor and suspended by the weight of oil paint, juxtaposing them with tiny works that fit into the palm of your hand, in which plaster is wrapped like a package from the butcher. Her paintings-made-physical have a real presence and there is always the scent of fresh oil paint, still drying.

Do Ho Suh, Walk The House at Tate Modern

Ever since my earliest experience with art, as a teenager, visiting Renaissance frescoes in Tuscan churches and palazzo’s with my parents, I have intuitively felt that art made me happy and fulfilled. I come from a family of scientists - my parents both doctors - and religion was never a part of my life, but for me walking into a museum is the equivalent of walking into a church: that sense of worship and awe, in communion with something bigger; a space to feel both calm and inspired. It took me a little longer to practice what I preach - ten years as a lawyer, five in real estate, and a few years of wobbles with my moods as a stay-at-home mother before I took the plunge to study art history and contemporary art - but I have never looked back.

The last few years I am supported by the research, too. There has been an exponential and exciting increase in research that is on the crossroads of neurology and art, on what it is exactly that art does to our brains. Artists have long known that making art is beneficial to mental health, but the new research on ‘Neuroaesthetics’ suggests that engaging with art in any way, including looking closely at artworks and being in architectural spaces, has enormous impact on our sense of wellbeing. In their 2023 book Brain on Art, Susan Magsamen, academic and founder of the Arts + Mind Lab at John Hopkins University, and Ivy Ross, creative and head of design at Google, explore this research further, and one of the things they found out is that just one art experience per month can extend your lifespan by ten years.

Well, that’s that out of the way. But don’t worry, this Substack is not going to be preachy or clinical or prescriptive; what I want to do here instead is to celebrate contemporary art and make it accessible and meaningful and fun. Since I visit on average three exhibitions a week, regularly visit artist’s studios for my writing, and also do a bit of collecting on the side, I want to use this Substack to share some of that with you! What excites me, what makes me think, what makes me smile? And if I were looking for an artwork to brighten up my own space, or, as my teenagers would say, to give it some ‘art vibes’, what works would I chose and why?

Because deep inside I am still that lawyer, there is one caveat. One of the things that held me back from embracing art earlier in my life was that I wanted to take the safe route - something that law seemed to promise. I wanted things in my life to be smooth, to make no mistakes. Maybe because of all of those French Existentialist books I had to read in secondary school, or the Dutch ones which all seemed to be about doom and despair, I was petrified of making the wrong choice. Having two children (and having taught some children, too), I think this is still a big thing - the fear of failure, the natural inclination to do what gets you the most praise from others. So with this Substack, I am going to practice being a little more daring. Trying things out. Getting things wrong. Listening to others. Learning on the way.

I hope you will join me on this journey, and embrace more art into your life. I can strongly recommend it - art for the mind.