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Chromatic Patronage: Margery Denton in Digital Reverie. By Hedge Fund

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Hedge Fund’s playful portrait of Margery Denton,the distinguished collector whose discerning eye has helped shape contemporary taste,radiates with an energy equal to its subject’s legacy. In vivid blocks of colour, Denton emerges not as a static likeness, but as an emblem of the cultural vitality she has so long championed. The golden glow of her skin, framed by a lavender sweep of hair, speaks less to realism than to aura: Denton as a figure who has illuminated galleries and institutions with her vision and patronage.

The artist draws knowingly upon the language of Pop Art, echoing the boldness of Warhol’s portraits of society icons, yet infuses the work with a distinctly digital sensibility. The turquoise brows, crimson lips, and jewel-sparkling earrings transform Denton into a near-mythic presence, at once glamorous and approachable. This is not the art collector as distant connoisseur, but as vibrant muse,rendered in a palette that affirms her role in expanding the possibilities of what art can be.

One cannot help but read this work as a dialogue between subject and medium. Denton, who dedicated her life to championing the new, is immortalized here through a digital vernacular that itself represents a frontier in visual culture. The portrait is both tribute and continuation: a collector who celebrated innovation now celebrated through innovation.

To live with this image is to live with more than a likeness of Margery Denton. It is to participate in her ongoing legacy, to acknowledge the spirit of curiosity and boldness that defined her career, and to carry forward the very ethos she embodied,that art must always remain fearless, luminous, and alive.

Edinburgh Fringe Review: Mind the Gap – A Love Story Performed Entirely Inside a Wheelie Bin

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Among the thousands of shows this year clamouring for our attention, Mind the Gap managed to stand out,largely because it was staged inside an actual council-issued wheelie bin.

Yes, that’s right. The performer, who introduces himself only as “Gregor, Keeper of the Lid,” spends the entire 55 minutes inside the bin, popping his head out occasionally to whisper sweet nothings about his doomed affair with the London Underground. The narrative, such as it exists, revolves around Gregor’s passionate yet forbidden love for the Piccadilly Line. “She was always late, but so am I,” he sighs, before lowering himself back into his plastic coffin and shaking it violently to simulate “the rumble of a train through the tunnels of desire.”

From the moment the show begins, audience comfort is not considered. We are crammed into a makeshift venue that resembles the back corridor of a Greggs, seated on stools that feel like they’ve been designed as a warning against sedentary lifestyles. The smell of bin plastic under stage lights fills the room, creating an atmosphere that can best be described as austerity chic.

The performance itself is a kind of postmodern endurance test. Gregor alternates between monologues about his subterranean romance and long periods of silence where he simply closes the lid and leaves us in darkness. One audience member whispered, “Is this part of it?” only to be shushed by Gregor’s muffled voice from inside: “All silence is part of it.”

There is, inevitably, music. At the 37-minute mark, Gregor produces a battered kazoo, pokes it through the bin slot, and wheezes out a haunting rendition of something that may have once been My Heart Will Go On. This, he tells us, represents “the signal failures of my soul.” A few people giggled; the rest stared into the void, wondering whether leaving early would constitute art criticism or self-preservation.

The finale is bold, if not exactly triumphant. Gregor attempts to climb fully out of the bin, tangling himself in his own prop railway map, before collapsing to the floor and declaring, “We are all commuters of the heart!” The house lights come up, revealing an audience unsure whether to clap, call for help, or demand a refund. In the end, we did clap, partly out of politeness and partly because we were relieved it was over.

Two stars.

One Star Reviews: The Calcium of Dreams – Toward an Invertebrate Consciousness

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“A Stunning Exploration of Absolutely Nothing”

An exhibition by the visionary choreo-sculpturalist Glinté Pavlova at The Wilhelm Centre for Emergent Visualities

I came to The Calcium of Dreams with an open heart, a functioning brain, and a decent pair of shoes. I left it emotionally concussed, intellectually bludgeoned, and deeply suspicious of mollusks. This show, which bills itself as “a radical unraveling of exoskeletal trauma and the pain of becoming,” manages to combine the sensory thrill of standing in a flooded basement with the intellectual rigour of a dolphin quoting Derrida.

Curated across three floors of The Wilhelm Centre,an institution already infamous for hosting last year’s Sneeze as Praxis,this show is the latest offering from Glinté Pavlova, a Lithuanian-born “articulationist” known for once glueing a taxidermied chihuahua to a Xerox machine. Here, she has turned her sights on “the ancient tensions between softness and structure, organism and architecture, bone and metaphor.”

The moment you enter, you’re greeted by Cephalopod Requiem I, a 12-foot-tall canvas mollusk shell coated in what looks like glitter, Nutella, and hair. Inside, an animatronic mannequin dressed as a Victorian funeral director periodically belches the word “legacy” in five languages. One elderly woman who entered the room when I did simply said, “No,” and walked out.

Not a good start. Unfortunately things only deteriorate from there.

On the second floor, the section labeled The Cartilage Suite offers viewers a chance to walk barefoot across a bed of discarded socks while a projector flashes MRI scans of knees onto a series of melting ice sculptures shaped like reclining nudes. A gallery attendant stood nearby ringing a Tibetan singing bowl every time someone looked confused, which meant the room sounded like an insufferable wind chime shop during an earthquake.

A video installation titled Mollusk as Mind: A Liquid Allegory features Pavlova submerged in a giant bowl of lukewarm almond milk, rotating slowly while reciting a list of 19th-century shipwrecks in reverse chronological order. It runs for six hours. I lasted 40 seconds before I began rooting for the concept of drowning.

Then there’s Calcium Interlude IV: The Oyster Screams, an audio installation played exclusively through floor speakers so you experience it with your feet. It’s described as “a sonification of ancestral pressure points”,what that seems to mean is that it’s 45 minutes of low-frequency moaning and what sounded like someone chewing wetly on rubber gloves. A nearby plaque quoted Pavlova saying, “Sound is texture without the burden of form.”

And then there was the “participatory piece.”

Entitled You Are the Exoskeleton, it involves donning a transparent PVC bodysuit and crawling through a maze of egg cartons while blindfolded, led only by the sound of a recorded Pavlova whispering just too quietly to be understood. I declined to participate, citing dignity. Still, I watched as two grad students took part; both were weeping softly by the end. One sat on the floor muttering whilst the other just rocked back and forth, whispering.

The obligatory gift shop at the end offered merchandise including “boneless memory sachets” (small bags of damp sand with handwritten haikus inside), calcium-themed posters, and a $360 “emotional clam knife” carved from recycled acrylic nails. I bought a pencil just to remind myself that functional objects still exist in the world.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not opposed to challenging art. I’m not a philistine. I once spent three hours watching an artist eat a bicycle whilst riding it, in Berlin. But The Calcium of Dreams is not challenging,it’s exhausting, directionless, and deeply enamored with the sound of its own nonsense.

It is the art-world equivalent of being stuck at a dinner party next to someone who won’t stop talking about their favourite kombucha – yes, I speak from experience.

One star. And that star is shaped like a mollusk, dying slowly in the sun.

Excavating the Algorithmic Sublime: The Work of Eira Varn

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Among the constellation of post-material digital artists emerging in the past decade, the formidable presence of Eira Varn has become a touchstone for critical debate. A figure equally at home in speculative philosophy and computational aesthetics, Varn’s practice orbits around one deceptively simple question: What does it mean to make art in a world where the material has become metaphysically irrelevant?

Born in 1989 in Helsinki but often described as a “non-geographic” artist, Varn’s early works were dismissed as opaque,dense video, sculptural assemblages and spliced open-source footage. But with the unveiling of her 2021 opus, “Substrate Will Not Save You,” critics were forced to contend with a practice that had moved beyond formal experimentation into something far more difficult to pin down.

Varn’s art now resists simple description. Her pieces exist inside custom neural environments,interior algorithmic systems that evolve autonomously. The works mutate across time, trained on esoteric data such as 16th-century meteorological notations and abandoned GitHub repositories. The resulting outputs evoke the uncanny melancholia of relics that were never quite real.

Critics have attempted to classify Varn’s work as “post-medium,” “neuro-generative,” or even “meta-phenomenological,” but such terms barely scratch the surface. More accurately, her practice might be located within what theorist Amira Nze refers to as the algorithmic sublime,a genre of aesthetic experience that overwhelms not through scale or grandeur, but through its ontological opacity. In Varn’s hands, the algorithm becomes not a tool of control, but a site of divination: oblique, self-obfuscating, and never quite addressable by human cognition.

In her 2023 exhibition “Axiomatic Remains” at the Kunsthalle Birmingham, viewers were presented with a room of blank screens that emitted only spectral humming and intermittent pulses of near-blinding light. The press release contained nothing but an excerpt from a Spinozan treatise: the audience had to trust that the work was there, even if its visibility was ephemeral.

Yet the most fascinating element of Varn’s work isn’t its inaccessibility,it’s its ethical ambiguity. By generating works that resist authorship, permanence, and even interpretation, Varn denies the viewer the usual consolations of comprehension. She replaces the artist-subject inside a system with a set of evolving rules that are never fully disclosed.

To engage with Varn’s work is not to decode it, but to dwell within its milieu. It asks of us a new form of spectatorship,one that is less about reception than attunement, less about aesthetic pleasure than metaphysical risk.

And perhaps this is where Varn’s legacy will ultimately reside: not in objects or exhibitions, but in the philosophical residue her work leaves behind. An artist of shadows and systems, Varn invites us not to observe,but to wait, as the substrate pulses, and the unknowable unfolds.

True Art Crime Podcast – Introduction

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Crimes of Beauty: Stolen Masterpieces, Shattered Truths

In the art world, beauty isn’t just admired… it’s hunted.

Behind velvet ropes and museum glass, masterpieces whisper their own kind of temptation,drawing not only collectors and dreamers, but thieves, forgers, and liars.

This series pulls us into the smoke-filled backrooms and midnight streets of the world’s most shocking art crimes. Crimes that left their scars on the canvas of culture itself.

We’ll unravel the tale of The Ravenna Job,when thieves tunneled under an opera house to lift a fresco straight off the wall, leaving nothing but dust and disbelief.

We’ll follow the twisted trail of Elias Vermeer, a gifted forger who painted false masters so perfect that museums fought over them,until his empire of lies collapsed in flames.

We’ll descend into the shadows of The Crimson Frame Murders, where stolen portraits seemed to mark their owners for death, and where beauty itself became a weapon.

And we’ll navigate the murky waters of The Odessa Exchange, a black-market pipeline where stolen icons funded wars, revolutions, and fortunes.

Each story is stranger than fiction. Each heist more daring, each deception more brazen. Because in this world, a canvas isn’t just paint and pigment,it’s power, greed, obsession, and betrayal.

Art was meant to outlive us. But in the hands of criminals, even immortality can be stolen.

Further History of Pimlico Wilde: The Art Dealers Who Whispered Through History

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Further History of Pimlico Wilde: The Art Dealers Who Whispered Through History

By Archibald Haversham

For more than a millennium, Pimlico Wilde have done what few institutions dare to claim: furnished not merely rooms, but reputations. From cloisters to courts, and from the smoking rooms of empire to the soundproofed studios of the 20th century, the firm has been present, always discreetly, often decisively.

The Council of Alfred (c. 878)

It was during Alfred the Great’s period of refuge in the marshes of Athelney that Pimlico Wilde first exercised its influence. With morale flagging, the young firm provided the King with a portable triptych depicting heroic Anglo-Saxon victories,few of which had at that point actually occurred. Displayed at his war council, the imagery proved galvanising. Historians may attribute Alfred’s later success to military ingenuity, but Pimlico Wilde’s ledger entry for the year, “Triptych, oaken, subject: Defiant Saxons triumphant. One hogshead of mead (payment)”, suggests otherwise.

The Coronation of Richard II (1377)

Coronations are rarely tasteful affairs, but Richard II’s ceremony nearly collapsed under the weight of gilded excess. Pimlico Wilde was summoned at the last minute to “curb the vulgarity” of the proceedings. Their solution, an elegantly embroidered canopy, balanced by a series of understated wall hangings, restored dignity to the spectacle. The firm’s archive records one bishop’s approving remark: “The boy looked almost like a monarch, and less like a golden pudding. Four cheers to Pimlico Wilde.”

The Tudors and a Timely Portrait

Henry VIII’s appetite for grandeur was matched only by his impatience. On one occasion, awaiting a diplomatic envoy, he demanded a portrait of himself “larger than life and completed by supper.” Pimlico Wilde dispatched three Flemish journeymen and, by cleverly repurposing an abandoned mural, produced a likeness within the day. The envoy, suitably awed, signed the treaty. The mural survives only in fragments, one of which, showing nothing but a broad expanse of crimson cloth, is still in Pimlico Wilde’s private collection, labelled simply: Diplomacy (Fragment).

A Georgian Gamble (1783)

After the American Revolution, Lord North, disgraced and adrift, sought comfort in the acquisition of Old Masters. Pimlico Wilde obliged, though their correspondence shows notable restraint: “My Lord, what you require is not grandeur but gravity. The two are very different.” They sold him a sober Dutch interior scene in which nothing whatsoever happens. North displayed it prominently, perhaps recognising the painting’s quiet metaphor for his own political career.

The Queen’s Secret Commission (1954)

Less known is Pimlico Wilde’s mid-century commission from Queen Elizabeth II. During a state visit, she required a discreet gift for the French president that would project British refinement without appearing extravagant. Pimlico Wilde’s solution: a 17th-century still life of apples and pewter, attributed to “Bob Sale, an English follower of Chardin.” Delivered in unmarked wrappings, the painting still hangs today in a corner of the Élysée Palace, where French staff refer to it as La Petite Diplomatie.

From monks to monarchs, premiers to poets, Pimlico Wilde have been there, a quiet hand shaping the visual lexicon of power. They may not openly claim credit for historical events like Alfred’s victories or Richard’s coronation, but their ledgers, invoices and the occasional wry marginalia tell another story.

As Lord Percival, the current chairman, puts it with customary understatement:

“History, for us, has always been a client account. Settled late, but invariably in full.”

Letters regarding the Symposium: Should Museums Ban All Visitors?

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Sir,

Regarding the recent Pimlico Wilde symposium, “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”, I feel compelled to offer a modest rejoinder. The proposition that the salvation of art lies in quarantining it from its audience is rather like suggesting that books be preserved by never opening them. It may indeed keep them intact, but at what cost? “To preserve is to kill,” as André Malraux once warned.

Yes, the public is clumsy. We lean where we shouldn’t, photograph where we mustn’t, and, on occasion, trip into priceless canvases. But to remove the visitor entirely is to render the museum a kind of taxidermy shop for culture,objects embalmed, not experienced. Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the artwork may well fade when digitised; it certainly suffocates when locked in a cupboard.

Art, unlike uranium, is not dangerous to behold. It is dangerous not to behold. “We do not see things as they are,” Anaïs Nin reminds us, “we see them as we are.” Without the flawed, imperfect, even damaging gaze of the human, the object becomes a sterile relic, stripped of its meaning, its context, and its risk.

Besides, if the visitor is to be banished for the occasional accident, must we also ban the curator who mishandles a frame, the restorer who over-bleaches a fresco, the registrar who misfiles a crate? The history of art is not the history of perfection, but of fallibility,of cracked varnish, of overpainting, of the coffee stain on the corner of a preparatory sketch.

Museums without visitors are simply warehouses with better lighting. One may admire the discipline of such a proposal, but as Oscar Wilde quipped, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” If no one is there to see the work, then no one is there to speak of it,and an unseen masterpiece is perilously close to a non-existent one.

I, for one, would rather risk the occasional elbow in a canvas than consign the whole of human creativity to a velvet-lined vault. Art is not made to survive us,it is made to be lived with.

Yours, somewhat exasperated,

Horatia Gardan

Author of the upcoming book The Mail Gaze, about art long ago when knights wore chain mail

One Star Reviews: Rumination in Mixed Media

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A Carnival of Ego and Glue

Review of Rumination in Mixed Media by Rex Caltrop at the Alabama Museum of Objects

There are bad art shows. There are pretentious art shows. And then there is Rumination in Mixed Media, which exists in a rarefied airless void all its own,a vacuum-sealed package of unchecked ego, performance-grade nonsense, and glue gun abuse. It is less a gallery exhibition and more an endurance test conducted under the slow, suffocating weight of someone else’s mushroom-induced epiphany.

Rex Caltrop, who describes himself as a “meta-sculptural dramaturge of the Third Axis,” has produced a body of work so utterly divorced from reality that one begins to suspect he may, in fact, not exist and just be an elaborate prank by rival conceptualists. He claims the show was inspired by “a moment of deep grief during an ayahuasca vision.” I would argue the true inspiration was a burning desire to waste the time of the unsuspecting gallery-going public.

Upon entering the exhibition, you are handed a pair of broken opera glasses and a wooden egg. You are told these are “tools for your encounter.” What they are, in practice, is litter.

The first installation, Sadness Engine #17, features a decommissioned fog machine draped in yoga mats and surrounded by half-melted clown shoes, arranged in a perfect spiral. A placard informs you that this piece “interrogates the skeletal architecture of performance grief.” I stood there for ten minutes, wondering how it did this and hoping the fog machine might turn on and add some interest to the ensemble. It did not.

Across the hall is a video piece titled Mimehole, projected onto a wall of carefully crushed cola cans. It’s a 37-minute film of the artist, nude except for a single roller skate trying to climb a mountain that looked like Ben Nevis. I’m not exaggerating when I say someone in the room whispered “He’s so brave”. I strongly and quietly disagreed.

The largest room in the gallery contains Clownbone: The Reckoning, a “sculptural anti-form” made from deflated pool toys and one enlarged rejection letter from Yale. A lone red balloon sits atop the mess, bouncing around as viewers walk around. I asked a gallery assistant,dressed in full Aston Villa kit, including boots ,what it meant. She said they were forbidden to discuss it.

The final room is an “immersive space” titled Bonezone: A Participatory Collapse. Guests are invited to lie on a vibrating floor mat while attempting to peel an onion with a tuning fork. The room smelt dangerously of used fireworks. The onion made me cry heavily.

To say this show is pretentious is to insult the fine tradition of pretense. This is not even faux-intellectualism. This is meta-pretentiousness,pretentiousness about pretentiousness, a feedback loop of pure, radiant nonsense curated under flickering lights.

I award Rumination in Mixed Media one star, solely because I’m legally unable to give it zero without the risk of a libel suit. The only thing more unhinged than this show is the certainty with which Caltrop speaks about it. He says his work “dismantles the hegemony of punchlines.” I say it’s a clown funeral organised by someone who’s never met the clown.

Avoid at all costs,unless you need a powerful reminder of why Dadaism was a phase, not a blueprint.

The Voice as Canvas: A Conversation with Callisto Erendira

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Few artists today embody the spirit of intermedial exploration as fluidly as Callisto Erendira. Known throughout the 2010s for her boundary-pushing conceptual installations and para-architectural sculptures, Erendira has, over the last few years, immersed herself in an entirely different kind of construction: opera. Her latest work, The Air Remembers the Mouth, premiered this spring at the Tempelhof Terminal in Berlin, is less a traditional opera than an “architectonics of voice and breath.” We met in a rehearsal space,bare concrete, scattered reeds, a harpsichord ,to discuss her move into opera as medium, not genre.

RENATA EL-AZHAR:

Callisto, many of us still associate your practice with material interventions in space,sheet metal bent like calligraphy, resin slabs embedded with soil. I have to ask, why opera?

CALLISTO ERENDIRA:

Opera, for me, is not an escape from materiality,it’s its sublimation. I often say I haven’t left sculpture; I’ve simply inverted its orientation. The voice is the breath made spatial. What interests me is the opera as a spatial organism, where the architectural body,stage, voice, gesture,becomes a site of invocation rather than representation.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you mean you are treating the voice sculpturally?

ERENDIRA:

Yes. But not only the voice,the conditions of the voice. I’m interested in the sonic theories of Oliver Jeffersen: the way sound moves through air is exactly like pigment moving across a canvas. In The Air Remembers the Mouth, each vocal part is assigned a material analogue. The contralto was paired with basalt powder, the mezzo-soprano with brass dust suspended in glycerin mist. We projected these associations as visual scores in the wings, but never explained them. I wanted the audience to intuit the logic of these breaths.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a moment in that piece,around the 430-minute mark,where a performer simply exhales for nearly two minutes. No pitch, no language. Can you say a few words about that?

ERENDIRA:

That exhalation is the most “composed” moment in the piece. We rehearsed it for weeks. I wanted to unmoor the audience’s expectation of vocal climax. In operatic tradition, the voice is a vehicle of pathos, of narrative propulsion. I was more interested in how expulsion,of air, of grief, of refusal,can become a kind of anti-narrative. It’s a political gesture. Silence that isn’t mute.

EL-AZHAR:

You mentioned once that opera allows you to “ritualize the failure of language.” That seems paradoxical, given opera’s dependence on libretto.

ERENDIRA:

That’s the paradox I’m trying to inhabit. The libretto for The Air Remembers the Mouth was originally written entirely in glossolalia,non-semantic syllables chosen for their muscular demands on the mouth and larynx. I wasn’t happy with the result; instead I collaborated with a phonetician and a dancer. Meaning was replaced by valency, by the physical torque of speech. The failure of language is precisely where it becomes fertile again.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a terrifying sense, around the seven hour mark, that you’re invoking ancient rites,opera as séance, almost.

ERENDIRA:

Absolutely. But not in a nostalgic way. I see opera as proto-cinematic, proto-installational. Before screens, before galleries, there were these public orchestrations of myth and affect. I’m not interested in merely reviving that form, but rather in abstracting its impulses. Think of the chorus not as narrators, but as rhythmic tissues. Think of the aria as an open wound.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you consider yourself still a visual artist?

ERENDIRA:

I don’t think in disciplinary terms anymore. Opera is a medium that more easily tolerates contradiction: it is visual, sonic, architectural, affective, intellectual. But I still return to materials. For example, with my next piece, I’m working with broken clarinets cast in salt and embedded into the stage.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s something almost entropic about that. A slow vanishing.

ERENDIRA:

Yes. You could say that entropy is just unobserved form. In which case my job is to make it visible.

Callisto Erendira’s The Air Remembers the Mouth will tour the Pimlico Wilde galleries in Helsinki, São Paulo, and Palermo in late 2025. Her operatic sketches and salt scores will be exhibited at the Palais de Eruminite in November.

Review: Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables – A Baroque Salad of Surrealism and Cinema

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First published in Vegetable Growers Weekly

Hannah Gralle’s London show at Pimlico Wilde is the first time for years that vegetables have taken centre stage in the art world. With Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Gralle takes a blowtorch to the sacred canon of cinema and flambés it with a distinctly postmodern irreverence. The result? A madcap, meticulously crafted reenactment of Orson Welles’ magnum opus using vegetables, stock cubes, and single malt.

Gralle’s stop-motion recreation comes startlingly close to the original’s visual grammar. It is not parody so much as culinary homage, recalling Jan Švankmajer filtered through a Waitrose aesthetic. The vegetables,carved, posed, occasionally withered,inhabit their roles with uncanny sincerity. Charles Foster Kane as a slightly bruised aubergine? It shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

The culmination of the film is a scene which isn’t in the original Citizen Kane, in which the entire cast is ceremonially consumed in a scene echoing Babette’s Feast. It is a masterstroke. Here, Gralle conjures a melancholic ephemerality: celluloid gives way to digestion, legacy to compost. Welles gave us “Rosebud”; Gralle gives us “roast bud.” Both are emblems of decay and memory, though only one is edible.

Beyond the screen, the conceptual rigor continues. The option for collectors to purchase the uneaten vegetable cast members,presumably now vacuum-packed relics,feels too arch. There is a sly commentary here on art commodification, perhaps even on the organic perils of preservation.

Gralle’s work oscillates between Dadaist prank and sincere tribute. If it wins the newly proposed Oscar category of Animated versions of classic films using vegetables, it will not be for novelty alone, but for achieving the rarest thing in contemporary art: taking the ridiculous and making it sublime.

In Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Hannah Gralle offers us not just a new lens on a classic, but a wholly new sensorial grammar of adaptation. It is cinema as gastronomy, sculpture as satire, and consumption as critique. Five stars from us.