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A Day in the Life of Dr. Liora Ishikawa: Art Historian and Archivist

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A Day in the Life of Dr. Liora Ishikawa: Art Historian and Archivist

At the edge of the Scottish Highlands, where the mist moves like breath across the moorland, lives Dr. Liora Ishikawa. A Japanese-British art historian, she is internationally regarded as the foremost authority on the Northern Romantic Sublime. Her days unfold in a kind of contemplative silence, governed more by light than by time, more by nuance than by necessity.

Liora is an independent scholar, lecturer, and the founder of the Sublime Index, a digital-physical archive documenting landscape painting from 1780 to the present,works that attempt to capture what she calls “the emotional topography of horticulturalism.”

Her favorite art movement is German Romanticism,Caspar David Friedrich, in particular. “He painted silence as if it were a person,” she says.

Her collection includes graphite studies by lesser-known Nordic landscape painters, an original woodblock from Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and a rare gelatin silver print by 19th-century photographer Gustave Le Gray of a boat sinking in the Thames.

Morning: Light as Metric

Liora rises not by alarm, but by the shifting quality of morning light through her studio’s leaded-glass windows. Today, that light is diffused and pewter-hued. She begins the day with a walk,always the same path, always alone. Over the stone bridge, past the lichen-covered cairn, along the loch where geese move in quiet formation. “Walking is a form of notation,” she once told her graduate seminar. “It maps thought onto place.”

At 8:30 AM, tea is made,Gyokuro, steeped precisely,and she sits by the hearth with a clothbound edition of Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Margins are filled with annotations in her elegant hand. Her scholarship is tactile; she never reads digitally. “The archive is a sanctuary, not a server,” she has often remarked.

Midday: The Work of Remembering

From 10:00 to 1:00, she works in her study, cataloguing submissions for the Sublime Index. Today, she’s reviewing an early-20th-century Swiss painting of the Aletsch Glacier, annotated by a mountaineer-artist who fell to his death during its completion. She researches the provenance, contacts a conservator in Zürich, and updates the metadata.

At noon, she breaks for broth, rye bread, and pear slices. Her partner, an ethnobotanist named Rowan, returns from the field with moss samples and a poem scrawled in a notebook. They eat mostly in silence, sharing glances and weather observations. Their conversation is like an old tapestry: frayed in places, beautifully woven in others.

Afternoon: Study and Silence

Liora’s afternoons are reserved for deep work. Today, she is writing an essay titled “Terrible Beauty: The Sublime as Ecological Mourning.” Her desk holds a magnifying loupe, a dip pen, a tray of dried lavender, and a 19th-century oil sketch of the Cuillin Ridge in Skye. As she writes, she listens to the wind: it seeps down the chimney, rattles the panes.

She believes artworks should never be described only by medium or school, but by atmosphere and effect. “The real question,” she writes, “is not what this painting is made of, but what it has made of you.”

Evening: Communion and Cloud

By 6:00 PM, Liora wraps herself in a Donegal wool shawl and walks again. At dusk, the hills dissolve into abstraction,just as Friedrich intended. She brings her field notebook, noting how certain clouds resemble chalk studies by John Constable, or how the fading gold in the heather mirrors a Turner seascape seen at twilight.

Dinner is simple,root vegetables, local cheese, and a dark berry tart. Afterward, she and Rowan read aloud from Bashō or Rilke, sipping herbal liqueur made from meadowsweet and sea buckthorn.

Night: Archive of Dreams

At 10:00 PM, Liora descends into the library annex,a room lined with locked drawers and flat files. Here, she inspects a newly arrived drawing: a tiny ink study by an Arctic explorer-artist, folded into a letter describing how light refracts differently at 83° north. She places it in its archival sleeve, labels it in copperplate, and exhales.

Before sleep, she opens her window to the night air. Somewhere, an owl calls. The sky is moonless, but stars gleam cold and distant, like the first pigments on untouched canvas.

She sleeps not to escape the day,but to dream deeper into its meaning. In her world, art is not a profession. It is a pilgrimage.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – The Life and Swim of Dorothea Pengelly

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – The Life and Swim of Dorothea Pengelly

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, unusually restless, attempting to gnaw at a recently popped cork)

Book Discussed:

Across the Grey Channel: The Life and Swim of Dorothea Pengelly, 1817,1883 by Miranda Hesketh (Severn & Trent Press, 2026; richly footnoted, with maps of tidal patterns and reproductions of Pengelly’s personal log).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux described the book as “half triumphal biography, half meteorological almanac,” and praised the publisher’s decision to bind it in sea-green linen “that already smells faintly of brine.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer found the work “an extraordinary story of a vanished heroine,” noting that Pengelly’s 1829 swim from Fishguard to Rosslare (just over 50 miles) was dismissed in its day as either “a hoax or hysteria.” Lorrimer praised Hesketh for combing Admiralty records to confirm Pengelly’s feat.

• India Trelawney admired the portraits of Dorothea in her ungainly woollen bathing dress, remarking that her achievement “redefined both endurance sport and women’s apparel.” She suggested the book was “ripe for adaptation into an opera.”

• Lord Northcote expressed skepticism: “The notion that a woman in 1829 swam the Irish Sea in a gale, with nothing but beef tea and stubbornness, beggars belief.” He hinted that Hesketh was “too credulous by half” in her reading of the surviving diaries.

• Hugo Van Steyn countered that the mix of nautical charts, tide tables, and local folklore gave the book “a conviction that defies cynicism.” He noted that the descriptions of coastal cheering crowds were “worthy of Turner, if Turner had painted applause.”

• Max Duclos grumbled that the book was “all waves and wind,” and would have been improved by “at least one murder or jewel theft.” Nonetheless, he conceded that the passages describing jellyfish encounters were “gripping in their horror.”

• Fiona d’Abernon praised the poignancy of the epilogue, in which Dorothea,by then elderly and ignored,was asked if she would do it again, and replied: ‘Only if Wales were still worth leaving.’

3. Objects on View

• An original cork-and-whale-skin swimming costume from 1825, (on loan from the Fishguard Maritime Museum)

• A framed lithograph of Rosslare Harbour, c.1830.

• A silver hip flask, said to have belonged to Pengelly’s brother, inscribed “To warm what the sea chills.”

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: Gin with tonic water and seaweed garnish.

• Canapés: cockles in garlic butter, smoked mackerel pâté on rye, miniature Welsh rarebit.

• Main wine: Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, 2021.

• Dessert: sea-salt caramel tart, followed by coffee “stiff enough to revive a drowning swimmer.”

5. Other Business

• August Book: The Melancholy of Keys: A Study in Everyday Symbolism confirmed as next selection (with some muttering from Duclos).

• Proposal from Trelawney for a possible field trip to Fishguard or Rosslare to “feel the air she breathed.” Tentative agreement, subject to funding.

• General consensus that Dorothea Pengelly, whether myth or marvel, deserves a blue plaque and a warmer place in history.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:32 PM.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Ephemeral Bodies: The Steamworks of Pavel Durović

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Ephemeral Bodies: The Steamworks of Pavel Durović

By Dr. Margot Helbling, Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics, Bonn, for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists

Among the many artists who tried to wrestle with the intangible in the late 20th century, none was quite so literally elusive as Pavel Durović (b. 1959, Brno). His chosen medium was not paint, stone, or film but steam,that fleeting condensation of heat and air that vanishes even as one watches.

Dismissed in his early years as a “plumber with delusions,” Durović has in recent decades been reassessed as a prophet of the immaterial, a forerunner of climate art, and,according to one enthusiastic critic,“the Turner of evaporation.”

Origins: The Accident of a Teakettle

The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that in 1983 Durović was working as a janitor in a Prague bathhouse when he noticed how steam rising from the pools created temporary shapes against tiled walls. He began experimenting with kettles, humidifiers, even rigged espresso machines, trying to compose these forms.

By 1987 he was staging small “steam shows” in abandoned warehouses. Viewers were handed towels and goggles. Curtains of mist filled the space, onto which Durović projected faint coloured lights, creating what one attendee called “paintings that breathed.”

Exhibitions: Works that Vanish

• “White Rooms” (1989, Brno): A series of enclosed chambers where visitors wandered through dense fog. At irregular intervals, vents released bursts of steam in geometric patterns,squares, spirals,that dissolved before they were fully formed.

• “The Evaporation Cycle” (1995, Documenta IX, Kassel): An outdoor installation that released carefully timed plumes of steam along the Fulda River. Depending on wind conditions, they either resembled ghostly sculptures or vanished instantly, infuriating critics.

• “Humidity Studies” (2002, Palais de Tokyo, Paris): Durović collaborated with climate scientists to adjust the microclimate of the galleries. The result was steam that condensed unpredictably on visitors’ skin. The wall text read only: “You are the canvas.”

Conflict and Decline

Durović’s practice was never easy to sustain. Museums complained about corrosion to their air-conditioning systems. Insurance companies balked at “scalding hazards.” By the late 2000s, his collective of assistants,nicknamed “the boilermen”,split after disagreements over whether to use chemical fog machines rather than “authentic” water vapor.

Durović himself called the output of fog machines “plastic clouds”. In a 2011 interview, he sighed: “My work lives only as long as the kettle is hot. That is both its beauty and its curse.”

Legacy: The Imprint of Nothing

Today, few tangible records of his work survive beyond photographs, rusted metal piping, and anecdotal accounts. Yet his influence lingers. Young installation artists cite him as a pioneer of “environmental temporality.” Eco-critics note his prescience: art that literally disappears into the atmosphere.

As curator Aisha Patel observed in a 2020 retrospective catalogue:

“Durović’s medium was vanishing. His exhibitions were rehearsals for loss. To stand in his steam was to practice letting go.”

The Artist Today

Now in his sixties and living quietly in Vienna, Durović rarely grants interviews. He occasionally stages private “steam sessions” in his kitchen for friends, using nothing more than a battered pot. Asked why he continues, he reportedly smiled: “Because steam is honest. It rises, it falls, and it leaves nothing but memory.”

The Life and Misadventures of Sir Justin Coppersmith – drawn from his Prison Diaries

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The Life and Misadventures of Sir Justin Coppersmith – drawn from his Prison Diaries

Drawn chiefly from his Prison Diaries, set down during his confinement in the Tower of London, serialised by Archie Hampton

Sir Justin Coppersmith (1742,?), court painter, essayist, and sometime Keeper of the Royal Canvases, occupies a most curious position in the annals of Georgian Britain. While many of his contemporaries remembered him for his grand historical panels,particularly his Triumph of St. Alban at Hampton Hall,posterity recalls him most vividly for the indignities suffered after a single careless remark upon the artistic pretensions of his sovereign.

It was in the spring of 1783, during the reign of His Majesty King George III, that Coppersmith’s fortunes turned. Having risen from provincial obscurity in Derbyshire to the rarefied office of Royal Painter Extraordinary, Sir Justin was entrusted not merely with the decoration of palaces, but with the delicate task of stewarding the monarch’s own amateur experiments in draughtsmanship. George III, whose appetite for agriculture, astronomy, and mechanical contraptions was exceeded only by his enthusiasm for dabbling in the arts, one day presented to his household an unusual sketch. Entitled, in the King’s own hand, Self-Portrait from Memory without a Mirror, the drawing bore scant resemblance to either His Majesty or, indeed, to any known human visage.

Where others in the court cooed and praised, Sir Justin,whether out of honesty, fatigue, or some fatal lapse of tact,recorded in his diary that the effort resembled “a terrible dawdling doodle, unfit to grace even the nursery walls.” This judgment, leaked from his private journal to a wag at the coffeehouses, spread swiftly through London, and within a fortnight the King himself had learned of it.

The result was swift and merciless: Sir Justin was arrested, stripped of his offices, and committed to the Tower of London. There he languished for seven years, his only companions being his brushes, a limited palette, and the vermin that plagued his cell. His diaries,smuggled out page by page by a sympathetic gaoler,relate both the bleakness of his confinement and the extraordinary stratagem by which he ultimately secured his liberty.

For, in the seventh year of his captivity, Sir Justin conceived a desperate plan. He painted upon canvas a likeness of himself in repose so convincing that even the wardens of the Tower, hardened by decades of trickery, were beguiled. Propping this counterfeit Coppersmith upon his straw pallet, he slipped unnoticed into the laundry cart, and,à la Sir John Falstaff’s legendary basket-escape,was carried out of the fortress with the soiled linens of the garrison. By the time his absence was discovered, he was already gone into the night.

The subsequent wanderings of Sir Justin, his accounts of Europe, and the curious epistolary fragments that survive from his later years will be treated in an upcoming book. In this serialisation, we concern ourselves chiefly with his prison writings, which stand as both confession and self-portrait,more lifelike, perhaps, than the daub of any king.

Silence in Stereo: The Story of The Anacoics Art Movement

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Silence in Stereo: The Story of The Anacoics Art Movement

By Prof. Daniel R. O’Shea, Department of Sonic Arts, Monmouth College, for the Handbook of Lesser-known artists

If the twentieth century belonged to artists who pushed sound to its limits,think of Cage’s chance compositions or Xenakis’s sonic bombardments,the early twenty-first briefly flirted with its opposite: a movement that attempted to sculpt with silence itself.

At the forefront of this paradoxical pursuit was the collective known as The Anacoics, founded in Glasgow in 2001 by three students who had grown tired of noise.

Origins: The Allure of Absence

The group’s name derives from “anechoic chamber”,spaces designed to eliminate echo and reverberation. Founders Graham Liddell, Aya Nomura, and Philip O’Connor began staging underground “performances” in which nothing audible occurred. The audience would sit in complete stillness while the artists moved silently around them, recording the room’s near-inaudible hums and bodily noises.

Their first manifesto, The Sonic Zero (2002), declared:

“Noise is everywhere. We offer the rare commodity: the sound of nothing. Our instruments are absence. Our scores are void.”

Exhibitions: Capturing Silence

• “Hushed” (2003, Tramway, Glasgow): Visitors entered a large padded room where microphones recorded the silence. The recordings were later released on CD, each track simply titled by its duration (“2’14”, “7’09”).

• “White Noise, Black Walls” (2006, Tote Modern, London): A vast gallery space painted black, with white speakers mounted on the walls. The speakers emitted… nothing. But visitors swore they “heard” tones and vibrations. Some critics called it mass hallucination; others, a breakthrough in psychoacoustics.

• “Mute Choir” (2009, Venice Biennale): Perhaps their most infamous work. Forty choristers stood in formation, mouths open, rehearsing the posture of song without releasing sound. The sight unsettled audiences: one critic wrote that “it felt like watching grief itself, wordless and immovable.”

Fractures and Falling Out

Success brought strain. Liddell believed silence was enough of a medium in itself; O’Connor wanted to incorporate faint tones and vibrations, “just enough to unsettle the ear.” Nomura, increasingly frustrated, accused both men of “fetishising quietness while ignoring sonic politics.”

The split became public during their 2012 New York show Zero Decibel, when Nomura stormed out mid-performance, declaring into a hot mic: “Silence is a privilege, and you’ve mistaken it for art.” The recording,ironically the loudest moment in the group’s history,went viral.

By 2013, The Anacoics had dissolved.

Aftermath

• Liddell now runs a retreat in the Scottish Highlands where visitors pay to “experience curated silences.”

• O’Connor became a sound designer for horror films, finally able to indulge his passion for barely audible frequencies.

• Nomura emerged as a leading critic of “acoustic inequality,” arguing that silence is denied to much of the world’s population.

Legacy: The Sound of Nothing

The Anacoics remain a fascinating footnote in the history of sonic art. Were they charlatans selling empty air, or pioneers forcing us to hear what we usually ignore?

In retrospect, their most enduring achievement may have been a simple reversal: making silence an object of attention, rather than its absence.

As one bemused critic wrote of their 2009 Biennale piece:

“For three minutes, I listened to forty singers say nothing. And for the first time, I realised silence might be the loudest sound of all.”

Exhibition Review: “Brilliant Portrait Show” by Sandy Warre-Hole

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To speak of Sandy Warre-Hole’s portraits merely in terms of likeness would be to miss the ontological stakes of her practice. In Brilliant Portrait Show, Warre-Hole stages the portrait not as representation but as deconstruction,a Derridean play between presence and absence, signifier and signified. The digital brushstroke becomes, in her hands, a différance of light: simultaneously revealing and withholding, insisting and erasing.

Portraiture After the Digital Revolution

Portraiture has historically functioned as the guarantor of presence,Velázquez, Holbein, and Ingres all sought to crystallise the sitter’s essence in paint. Yet, as Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, representation is always already bound by systems of knowledge and power. Warre-Hole enters precisely at this juncture: her digital portraits acknowledge the impossibility of fully capturing subjectivity, maybe not as much as her contemporary and fellow Pimlico Wilde artist Doodle Pip, but even so her images seduce us, even if it is only with the illusion of access.

Her sitters,rendered in painstaking strata of colourful translucency, are situate between what Lacan would call the Imaginary (the coherent self-image) and the Symbolic (the fragmented, mediated subject). The glitch, the artifact, the trace of digital imperfection: these are not errors, but rather inscriptions of the Real,the inassimilable remainder that resists smooth assimilation into the portrait.

A Dialogue with Avant-Garde Histories

The lineage of Warre-Hole’s practice extends beyond digital art into the radical materialism of the avant-garde. Consider the French sculptors of the 1970s,César compressing automobiles into monuments of entropy, Arman amassing accumulations of shattered objects, Niki de Saint Phalle exploding the figure into exuberant assemblage. Warre-Hole shares their impulse to treat material as concept: pixels as both medium and metaphor, the raw matter of contemporary identity compressed into the digital surface.

Her “Tomas in Motion”, for instance, resonates with Futurist preoccupations with velocity yet grounds them in the instability of subjectivity. “Eleanor at Dusk” evokes not just Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro but also Derrida’s notion of the trace: light as presence haunted by its own absence.

The Gaze, Performed and Subverted

Perhaps most striking is Warre-Hole’s manipulation of the gaze. In Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the gaze is always doubled,what is seen, and what sees. Warre-Hole complicates this structure: her sitters often look out with an intensity that implicates the viewer. We are both subject and object of the gaze, caught in what one might call a recursive loop of spectatorship.

This strategy carries with it a sly humour. A background plant rendered in high resolution, a reflection that – like Manet’s barmaid – fails to align, a deliberate misregistration of teeth,all remind us that portraiture is, fundamentally, a performance. If Barthes’s Camera Lucida mourned the that-has-been of photography, Warre-Hole offers the what-could-be of digital presence: endlessly mutable, perpetually deferred.

Collectors in Awe

“Warre-Hole’s work makes visible the Derridean undecidability of identity,an impossible fullness that nonetheless compels belief,” writes Adrian de Silva, collector and amateur philosopher.

“Living with one of her portraits is to experience the Foucauldian gaze inverted: I do not own the portrait; it owns me,” reflects Ellen Huang, whose collection now features “Eleanor at Dusk.”

Mara Jenner is more succinct: “Warre-Hole has achieved what the avant-garde always promised,to fracture our certainties while seducing us utterly.”

Toward a Digital Sublime

In Brilliant Portrait Show, Sandy Warre-Hole situates herself not as a digital technician but as a philosopher of the image. Her works resonate with the avant-garde’s material daring, the Old Masters’ gravitas, and post-structuralism’s suspicion of presence. What emerges is not a mere likeness of the sitter, but an epistemological inquiry into their very existence. We are forced to ask how, in an age of infinite reproduction, can the singular face still wound us, still move us, still hold us in thrall? To stand before a Warre-Hole portrait is to experience a paradox: the sitter is there and not-there, intimate yet unreachable. It is precisely in this undecidability that her genius lies.

Whispering to the Marble: A Conversation with Henri Pagnol

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Whispering to the Marble: A Conversation with Henri Pagnol

By Élise Durante

In his Marseille studio, Henri Pagnol greets me not with a handshake but with a hush. “You don’t begin with words,” he says, “you begin with the air between them.” For nearly five decades, Pagnol has pursued one of the less popular practices in contemporary art: whispering into objects until they change. I sat down,quietly,with the man some critics have dubbed ‘the sculptor of patience.’

Élise Durant: Monsieur Pagnol, your medium is… breath. That seems, let’s be honest, both poetic and, can I say, a little absurd.

Henri Pagnol: Absurd? Perhaps. But so is chiseling marble with a hammer. One is brute force; the other is persistence. Which is more absurd: cracking a stone in a day, or convincing it,over decades,that it wishes to soften?

Durant: Do you truly believe your whispers alter these objects?

Pagnol: Believe? I do not need to believe. I see the surface dull, I see the sheen vanish, I see the glass fog permanently. Science would call it moisture and time. I call it intimacy.

Durant: Some would argue that’s simply corrosion, not art.

Pagnol: Yes, and some argue that Cézanne was simply putting fruit on a table. Art begins when corrosion is chosen, repeated, and loved.

Durant: Why whisper, though? Why not speak, sing, or shout?

Pagnol: A whisper is a confession without spectacle. Shouting scars. Whispering persuades. The marble must feel I am not threatening it.

Durant: Do you choose particular texts to whisper to each object?

Pagnol: Always. Poems, prayers, fragments of manifestos, recipes, secrets I am ashamed of. Words shape the mouth differently. A poem by Rilke softens copper in a way that a shopping list cannot.

Durant: There is a rumour that museums give you after-hours access to continue whispering into your exhibited works.

Pagnol: Rumour? Fact! I visit my pieces like others visit relatives in hospital. They must not feel abandoned.

Durant: Isn’t there a certain vanity in thinking objects respond to your voice?

Pagnol: Vanity is chiseling your name into stone. Humility is knowing the stone will erase you eventually,but still speaking to it as an equal.

Durant: You’ve been called “the slowest sculptor alive.”

Pagnol: That’s generous. Time does most of the sculpting. I am only the methodology.

Durant: What would you say to someone who whispers at their coffee mug tomorrow morning and finds nothing has changed?

Pagnol: I would say: whisper longer. Whisper every morning for twenty years. Then lift it in your hand and tell me it does not feel different.

Durant: Do you ever fear that, after all these years, your practice might be dismissed as eccentric performance?

Pagnol: Fear? No. A whisper is always dismissed at first. Until one day, you realize it has changed the entire world.

Durant: Last question. If you could whisper into any object in the world, what would it be?

Pagnol: The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I would whisper in French, very slowly, until the crack sealed itself,not with bronze, but with silence.

As I leave, Pagnol is already back at work: leaning close to a block of Carrara marble, murmuring syllables so faint I cannot tell if they are words or sighs. The marble does not respond, at least not yet. But the room feels strangely attentive, as though holding its breath.

Van Gogh (Not that one): The Grammar of Elsewhere at Pimlico Wilde Delhi

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Van Gogh (Not that one): The Grammar of Elsewhere at Pimlico Wilde Delhi

Pimlico Wilde is delighted to announce the first Indian exhibition of Van Gogh (Not that one), the enigmatic artist whose practice has been described as “an alphabet for a language that refuses to exist.” The show, titled The Grammar of Elsewhere, opens next month at Pimlico Wilde Delhi and promises to be a meditation on both the syntax of gesture and the cartography of intent.

The exhibition will feature several new works, among them Subjunctive Drift, Anaphora in Red, and Map Without Territory. Each piece is a confrontation with the moment of making,marks discovered rather than composed, as though pulled from the ether of movement itself. These are not paintings in the traditional sense, but residues: fragments of intention crystallised against the friction of memory and motion.

Jules Carnaby, Head of Pimlico Wilde, observes:

“Van Gogh (Not that one) has succeeded in making marks that appear at once inevitable and impossible. His work exists in the uncanny interval between refusal and invocation. Standing before them, one feels not so much that one is looking at art, but that art is looking back at you,bemused, patient, and slightly mischievous.”

The artist himself, when pressed, offers only the gnomic:

“My work is not composed but discovered. I am only trying to keep up with what my hands already know.”

We asked him whether the persistent parenthetical,(Not that one),ever weighs on him. He smiled, shrugged, and replied:

“It keeps me honest.”

Rumours abound that several Indian billionaires are already vying for the larger works.

The Grammar of Elsewhere will open to the public at Pimlico Wilde Delhi in the spring. Whether you come for the gestures, the grammar, or simply the sheer relief of not seeing sunflowers, this is an exhibition not to be missed.

Pimlico Wilde: The Dealers Who Civilised the World

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Pimlico Wilde: The Dealers Who Civilised the World

New findings by Esmerelda Pink

Historians like to imagine that civilisation advances through science, reason, and the occasional enlightened monarch. The newly examined Wilde Papers, however, make a far bolder claim: without Pimlico Wilde, humanity would still be cowering in mud huts, our evenings untroubled by opera, our walls as bare as our imaginations.

Newton’s Apple, Framed (1667)

A ledger from Cambridge notes the sale of a Dutch still life of fruit,apples prominent,to a “Mr. Isaac Newton, Fellow.” A Wilde clerk records: “Client requested precise rendering of fruit for study. Suggested he consider falling aspect.” Not long after, Newton drafted his laws of motion.

Voltaire’s Salon, Illuminated (1733)

Voltaire’s Parisian circle is celebrated for wit and radical thought, but a newly found invoice suggests it may never have flourished without Pimlico Wilde’s intervention. The dealer supplied “candlesticks of uncommon brilliance,” ensuring that the salon remained well-lit past midnight. Voltaire’s famous quip,“I may disagree with you, but I shall defend to the death your right to speak”,was, it seems, first uttered while admiring the gleam of imported ormolu.

Einstein’s Viennese Distraction (1905)

A telegram from the Wilde archive, sent to Zurich in 1905, confirms the delivery of a modest print of intersecting railway lines to a certain A. Einstein. The clerk observes: “Client entranced by perspective,spoke much of simultaneity. Promised to send payment once relativity proven.” Historians now speculate that without Pimlico Wilde’s contribution, the theory of relativity might never have achieved its iconic railway analogy, and physics lectures worldwide would be the poorer for it.

The Birth of Opera (Venice, 1607)

Perhaps the most audacious claim comes from a vellum-bound account book: Pimlico Wilde’s Venetian outpost provided Monteverdi with a set of tapestries “depicting musicians in heavenly chorus.” The inspiration, it seems, encouraged him to stage L’Orfeo, widely recognised as the first opera. “Without us,” a Wilde margin note declares with rare immodesty, “Europe would still be singing madrigals in the dark.”

In aggregate, the Wilde Papers dismantle the heroic myths of progress. It was not genius alone, but genius framed, furnished, and occasionally illuminated by Pimlico Wilde. Civilisation, in short, was curated.

Book Review: Nude Descending an Escalator by Marigold Finch

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Book Review: Nude Descending an Escalator by Marigold Finch

Marigold Finch’s Nude Descending an Escalator is a daring, absurdist romp that catapults the reader into a world where art history meets slapstick performance art,and occasionally trips over its own conceptual feet. The novel’s title, a cheeky nod of course to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, sets the tone for a story that’s as much a critique of artistic pretension as it is a celebration of human clumsiness.

The protagonist, Eloise Tangier, is a performance artist whose magnum opus involves literally descending a crowded metropolitan escalator completely nude,armed only with a handheld fan and several banana peels. Eloise’s endeavor is part protest, part existential inquiry, and part accident-prone spectacle, as she seeks to challenge public notions of beauty, movement, and personal space (the latter being particularly relevant during rush hour).

Finch’s writing is witty and brisk, peppered with sharp observational humor about the art world’s often bewildering intersection with everyday life. Dialogue has a deadpan delivery, for example when Eloise’s curator friend remarks, “If Duchamp saw this, he’d probably spill his coffee.” In context that line is hilarious.

Beyond the laughs, the novel offers an oddly poignant meditation on vulnerability and visibility. Eloise’s naked descent becomes a metaphor for shedding societal expectations,though, given the setting, she also has to contend with spilled coffee, confused commuters, and a rogue poodle with performance ambitions of its own.

At times, the narrative feels as dizzying as an actual escalator ride, looping between Eloise’s past, her conceptual inspirations, and her increasingly absurd public performances. Some readers may find the nonlinear structure disorienting, but for those willing to embrace the chaos, it’s part of the charm.

Nude Descending an Escalator is a spirited exploration of art, London, patisseries and what it means to move forward while utterly exposed. Marigold Finch has crafted a book that’s equal parts farce and philosophy,and a reminder that sometimes the most profound statements come from the most unexpected slips.

Recommended for art lovers, fans of performance pieces gone delightfully awry, and anyone who’s ever considered the emotional risks of public transportation.