The Hedge Fund Art Diaries #3

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Shoreditch café, with an oat matcha decaf latte and sunglasses

Collectors, thank you for making my career change so enthralling and lucrative. I had thought that being a hedge fund manager would be more profitable than being an artist, but thanks to you I know that it is the artist who has the bigger wallet.

 It has been exactly 217 days since I left my job in the City to pursue my true calling: digital artistry. I am no longer Managing Director of ****** ****** – I am now Hedge Fund, Visual Philosopher of the Blockchain Renaissance. My mediums are pixels, styluses and electricity.

This morning I unveiled my latest work: Cool Sexy Capitalism , a looping animation of a melting Gherkin (the building, not the pickle) raining pound signs into a Louis Vuitton puddle. I priced it at a modest £170,000 because I’m not here to devalue culture. A man on Instagram offered me £84,000 and a “shoutout.” I blocked him for the good of the arts.

I’ve also completed Liquidity Crisis No. 3, which is a 3D-rendered goldfish screaming silently in a martini glass. Deeply moving. Critics say it makes them dizzy.

People keep asking, ‘Hedge, do you miss finance?’ And I say, “No, I am free now. Free to sit in cafés with exposed brick walls, drawing surreal clouds, and saying things like “the algorithm is my brush,” which I caught myself saying yesterday.

Today I attended a digital art fair in Hackney. A man wearing chainmail and Crocs told me my piece NFTs are My Love Language made him “feel like a spreadsheet trapped in a lava lamp.” Which, honestly, is exactly the reaction I was going for. He didn’t buy it, but he did offer to trade for a bag of homegrown mushrooms and a zine about Hackney’s sewer system.

I politely declined.

I remain committed to selling nothing for less than £100,000. Anything cheaper, and it’s basically clip art for peasants.

Oh , and big news , I’ve been invited to exhibit at an “underground crypto-baroque gallery” in Dalston. It’s inside what used to be an urban chicken farm. Very exclusive. They serve wine out of jam jars and nobody has health insurance.

Anyway, I must dash , I’ve got to finish my latest piece: Bear Market Ballet, a digital image of Jeff Bezos pirouetting through a thunderstorm of emojis.

Artfully yours,

Hedge (digital artist, ex-finance bro)

Art with Your burger! Pimlico Wilde Teams Up with Vottle Burgers for a Truly Rare Medium

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Fusing the haute with the hotplate, contemporary art dealers Pimlico Wilde have entered a decadent partnership with Vottle Burgers, the gourmet burger atelier best known for their menu items that require both a mortgage and a sommelier. The centrepiece of this new alliance? A complimentary artwork with every purchase of the Vottle Cheesey Truffle Burger™,a towering, truffle-laced behemoth priced at £174 and described by its creators as “a deconstruction of the hamburger as concept.”

For those unfamiliar with Pimlico Wilde, the gallery is known for championing emerging artists such as Greta Splinter, (famous for swimming the Channel dressed as a sausage) as well as dealing in older, more blue chip art; to find them issuing art with burgers is, at first glance, like seeing Gertrude Stein sell tote bags at Pret.

But this is no mere marketing gimmick. Each Cheesey Truffle Burger is wrapped in an original, signed artwork by a Pimlico Wilde artist. The works are, we are assured, limited edition, and are expected to rise in price enormously. Already works – freely obtained with a burger – are been sold on eBay for hundreds and thousands of pounds.

“We wanted to collapse the artificial boundaries between consumption and contemplation,” explains Gaspard Pimms, co-owner of the gallery. “Why should art be separate from the visceral pleasures of umami?”

Vottle Burgers, for their part, have long flirted with the art world. Their flagship Soho location resembles a deconstructed Henry Moore, and their side of fries (called Existential Potatoes) are served with a handwritten poem about decay written on the inside of their wrapper. The new collaboration, they insist, is the logical next step in merging gastronomy with gallery-going.

The Cheesey Truffle Burger™ itself is an exercise in edible opulence: dry-aged Wagyu beef, truffle-infused double cream Gruyère, pickled shallots sous-vide in Champagne, and a secret aioli described by one food critic as “a spiritual awakening in a sauce.” Continuing the art world influence, the burger isn’t served on a plate but rather a plinth.

Early adopters of the art-burger have expressed both confusion and delight. One patron, sipping kombucha from a ceramic goblet shaped like Munich’s Scream, remarked: “I love my free artwork. I think it is a critique of fast food.”

Critics have been quick to weigh in. Some praise the collaboration as “a bold dismantling of elitist art consumption,” while others call it “a gastro-capitalist horror story.” The Aberdeen Standard’s food columnist gave the project no stars.

Whether it’s a playful provocation or a truffled Trojan horse smuggling contemporary art into your lunch hour, Art Burger is undeniably of its time: ephemeral, confusing, and most important of all, Instagrammable. It also gives the Art Market a delicious question to answer; what, exactly, is the resale value of a ketchup-stained lithograph that has been used to wrap a burger?

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the Raffaella Montesi meeting

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May 2025

7:00 PM , 10:55 PM

Blue Parlour, 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)

• Conrad Smithe (Full Member)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, curled beside the fire, tail occasionally thumping)

Book Discussed:

Notes Toward a Theory of Shadows in Painting by Raffaella Montesi (micropress, Rome, 2023; printed in an edition of 75, letterpress with hand-mixed inks, includes tipped-in monochrome plates).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux, clearly relieved to be “back among the familiar cadences,” opened with a wry nod to the joint meeting with the Bibliophiles of Belgravia: “No nettle bindings tonight, no unsolicited codex theories, just us, the book, and whatever Pascal is dreaming about.”

He outlined Montesi’s premise,that shadows in art are not mere by-products of light, but independent agents within the pictorial space, exerting aesthetic and psychological influence.

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer praised Montesi’s historical sweep, noting her treatment of shadows in Piero della Francesca as “luminous absences” and in de Chirico as “claustrophobic presences.” She admired the way the book “reclaims the shadow as an active character.”

• India Trelawney focused on the reproduction quality of the plates, particularly a hand-tipped detail of a Whistler nocturne: “It’s as if the shadow is brushing back against you.” She also remarked that Montesi’s typography “feels like 1930s Italian modernism caught in a beam of torchlight.”

• Lord Northcote confessed to being “seduced by the chapter on diplomatic portraiture” in which shadows were subtly adjusted to flatter the sitter’s profile.

• Hugo Van Steyn related Montesi’s arguments to contemporary art, citing Idris Khan’s layered photographic works and their “compression of time into tonal haze.” He declared the book “the most elegantly impractical thing I’ve read all year, and that includes Faversham’s The Way Forward is a Step Backwards.”

• Max Duclos admitted admiration for the premise but questioned whether Montesi’s occasional speculative leaps,e.g., her claim that in Las Meninas, Velázquez paints “a shadow of the viewer”,were “critical insight or wishful poetics.”

• Conrad Smithe agreed with Duclos in part, but defended Montesi’s “willingness to court the improbable,” adding, “The shadow has always been half-imagination.”

• Fiona d’Abernon remarked that the book’s unindexed structure made it “a little like walking down a corridor lit only by the open doorways you’ve already passed.” Several members murmured approval of the metaphor.

3. Artworks on View

• A chiaroscuro woodcut by Ugo da Carpi, on loan from a private collection

• Small oil study, Shadow of a Balustrade (attributed to Sickert)

• Contemporary ink wash drawing Five Minutes Before Sunset by Ananya Patel, created in response to Montesi’s text

• A photograph from Van Steyn’s own collection: anonymous 1920s street scene, the shadow of the photographer long and central, subject absent

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: The Piero , white vermouth, lemon zest, single green olive

• Canapés: black sesame crisps with whipped goat’s cheese, miniature cep tartlets, and anchovy fillets rolled with lemon peel

• Main wine: Barolo 2017, poured in large-bowled glasses “to let the shadows breathe”

• Dessert: dark chocolate torte with salted fig compote, served on matte black plates

5. Other Business

• Brief discussion on possibly issuing a Groupette “Occasional Papers” pamphlet series, beginning with member essays on books read in 2025.

• Molyneux confirmed no further joint meetings “until at least the following decade,” to general approval.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:55 PM after a final toast “to the shade that makes the light worth noticing.” Pascal was observed sleeping deeply.

Fiona d’Abernon

Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Sad news: Postponement of the opening of our flagship North Pole art gallery

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Sad news: Postponement of the opening of our flagship North Pole art gallery

by Sally Constantopolous, Head of Spaces

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce a delay in our plans to open the world’s first contemporary art gallery at the North Pole.

When we first announced “Pimlico Wilde: the Polar Contemporary Art Space”, also known as Pimlico Pole, the response was phenomenal. People said things like “Why?” and “Are you okay?” and “What’s the tax rate in the Arctic?” But we were determined.

Unfortunately, after multiple reconnaissance trips (including one unforgettable encounter with an extremely territorial Arctic fox), we’ve had to push back the launch.

We’d planned to livestream the opening so that patrons worldwide could experience Olaf Concu’s installation piece “Fjord Fiesta”, a Wembley-sized ice sculpture of a giraffe driving a small car. Sadly, the best Wi-Fi signal we could find was from a Russian weather balloon floating 60 miles overhead, and the password used letters we couldn’t find on our keyboards.

Eco-consciously we’d intended to use local wildlife to transport supplies to the Pimlico Pole Gallery. Unfortunately, the reindeer of the region are unionized, or at least their owners are, and they have very strict rules about hauling non-essentials. We pointed out that art was an essential, but they refused to agree. One of these owners actually threw a snowball at me whilst demanding hot chocolate. The negotiations were fruitless.

Also, despite assurances from a consultant named Erik Mountebank who claimed to be an “Arctic Art Engineer,” we found out that acrylic paint does not appreciate -40°C. Nor does the average sculptor. Snall Wodema’s work, a kinetic installation titled “Entropy in Motion part 2”, simply refused to move. It froze solid and fell over.

Further, you would be amazed how difficult it is to spot a white snowmobile parked on a glacier in a blizzard. We lost four and almost didn’t make it home. We worry that visitors might sue us if they can’t leave the North Pole.

So, for now, we must announce a – hopefully short – delay in bringing avant-garde expressionism to the polar ice cap. But never fear, Pimlico Polar is not cancelled.

In the meantime, our galleries around the world remain open, warm, and free of penguins. Why not visit Dapa Song’s show “FatDrop” at our Belimour Gallery, or experience Grimi Sae Dalloy’s performance piece “Six ways to pickpocket a gallery visitor” in our space on Guelph Street, Guaita.

Thank you for your patience and your passion for art. We’ll keep you posted. Hopefully the world’s first gallery at the North Pole will open soon. Everyone on our newsletter list will automatically get an invitation to the opening party. If you decide to come we recommend wearing bobble hats, warm socks, and goggles. Don’t forget to bring emergency rations, and a pair of skis wouldn’t go amiss.

See you at the North Pole

Culture & Capital: Inside the Mayfair Book Groupette

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Culture & Capital: Inside the Mayfair Book Groupette

In a genteel Georgian townhouse just off Mount Street, beneath a chandelier that once belonged to a minor Habsburg archduchess, Mayfair’s most discreetly cerebral gathering convenes on the fifth Thursday of each month. It is the Mayfair Book Groupette,an assembly of collectors, consultants, and the culturally acquisitive,quietly sponsored by Pimlico Wilde, one of London’s most enigmatic boutique art dealerships.

Pimlico Wilde is known less for its press releases than for its whisper network: if you know, you know. Specialising in contemporary and early-late painting, the firm has long blurred the lines between patronage and performance. With the Mayfair Book Groupette, it extended its reach beyond the salon wall to the salon itself.

The book group, founded in 1865 by Pimlico Wilde’s quondam director Jag Mole and collector-turned-literary philanthropist Fiona d’Abernon, was conceived as an “antidote to panel fatigue and performative erudition,” as Mole put it in his famous diaries, “We wanted to create a space where taste could speak without shouting.”

Each month, a single title,selected via an opaque, vaguely oracular process involving Pimlico Wilde’s in-house archivist and a whisky-fuelled shortlist dinner,is read and discussed over Comté gougères and 2015 Puligny-Montrachet. The choices are eclectic but rarely random: the group has moved from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red to Teju Cole’s Open City, and from the essays of Walter Pater to the letters of Vita Sackville-West.

“This is not your average book club,” member Deidre C notes with a wry glance. “We had someone attempt to bring The Midnight Library once. It was dealt with humanely but firmly.” The group’s unofficial motto,Nothing too recent, nothing too obvious,is embroidered in needlepoint on a cushion that lives on the chaise longue in the reading room.

Discussion is unfailingly civil, but not without edge. A recent session on Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline veered unexpectedly into a debate on the aesthetics of austerity, with a hedge fund director citing Cistercian architecture and a fashion curator countering with 1990s Helmut Lang. There are no “star readers,” but regular attendees include a Heckle’s specialist, a former Booker judge, and a member of the House of Lords who occasionally contributes sotto voce commentary on 19th-century French literary decadence.

That the group is sponsored by an art dealership is not incidental. Each gathering takes place amid a rotating exhibition of works loosely themed to the month’s reading. When the group read Death in Venice, the drawing room was hung with Arnold Böcklin prints and an enigmatic oil of a boy on a Lido beach, possibly by von Stuck. During a discussion of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the walls featured mid-century Harlem sketches attributed to Beauford Delaney, on loan via private collection.

“It’s a form of curatorial dialogue,” Mole explains. “We’re interested in the crosscurrents between text and object, intellect and visual form.” It is also, naturally, a soft-power play in the secondary art market,several guests have left the townhouse with a signed first edition and a watercolour under their arm.

What distinguishes the Mayfair Book Groupette from its more performative peers is not just its taste but its tempo. It is unhurried, sceptical of consensus, and uninterested in clout. Phones are discouraged, attendance is by invitation (or via a long, quietly monitored waitlist), and there is no social media presence,unless one counts the Instagram account of the group’s Afghan hound, Pascal, which is private and locked.

In an age when cultural engagement is often measured in metrics and impressions, the Mayfair Book Groupette offers an older, rarer model: reading as a form of aesthetic connoisseurship, discussion as an extension of collecting. It is elitist, of course,but with an elegance that makes the charge feel beside the point.

As one long-time member quipped between sips of Armagnac: “If you’re asking who it’s for, it probably isn’t for you.”

What do we Look For when choosing an Artist for Pimlico Wilde?

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What does silence smell like when translated into movement?

At Pimlico Wilde, we don’t represent artists in the conventional sense. We cultivate enigmas. We seek out the unruly minds, the inconvenient geniuses, and the creative athletes who do not fit inside the polite folds of contemporary art institutions. Ours is not a gallery for the merely talented , we curate the improbable, the unsettling, the impossible-to-ignore.

Who We Represent

Our artists are visionaries who are not content to just make art , they must become it. Their work is not simply exhibited; it is absorbed, argued with, sometimes even feared. A Pimlico Wilde artist makes work that interrogates, undermines, transcends.

We have recently turned down-

• A Neo–mystic group who paint while blindfolded and fast for three days every four days.

• Algorithmic dissidents who rewrite obsolete software in forgotten languages to generate chaotic visual structures.

• Conceptual botanists who grow living installations from seeds planted in books banned in at least three countries.

• Sonic archaeologists who seek out information about extinct birds, then reconstruct their songs and attempt to get the London Philharmonic to play them at the end of their concerts.

We have just accepted –

An artist who only exhibits work in other people’s dreams. (If you don’t dream about it, you aren’t invited to the private view).

Our Typical Application Requirements

We receive countless unsolicited portfolios. Almost all are discarded, not out of arrogance, but because our application process has not been adhered to. It weeds out anyone not fully committed. Here are our current, non-negotiable requirements for any artists wishing to join the Pimlico Wilde stable.

1. You must have been banned from exhibiting in at least one public venue , we have no desire to know why.

2. Your artist statement must be sent to us written in a fictional language of your own invention, complete with a pronunciation guide and grammatical overview.

3. You must submit 500 words explaining why you believe you should not be represented by us. The more convincing, the better.

4. You may not include a CV. We do not care where you studied, who reviewed you, or how many followers you have. If even a short biography is included, you will not be read at all.

8. A final requirement, and the most important: you must answer this question in either twelve, ninety-one or two thousand and three words:

What does silence smell like when translated into movement?

Why?

Pimlico Wilde was never intended to be just a commercial gallery. Our collectors are rare and discerning. They don’t purchase art for investment; they want work that alters them, not flatters them.

If you’re an artist seeking safety, stability, or understanding , this isn’t the place. But if you’ve ever felt like you were making art with a fever and no audience, no map, and no market , perhaps you already belong.

We’re not easy to find. But then, neither are you.

If you are interested in finding out more, please contact us via whatever you deduce to be the correct email address. If you haven’t heard from us for over a year, and you are certain you fulfilled all the requirements, then you probably didn’t have the right email address.

NB: We reserve the right to change, limit, remove or ignore any requirements, at any moment, for any length of time.

A Quiet Drama in Shadow: Jane Bastion’s ‘Silhouettes of Life’

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There is a hushed power in Jane Bastion’s new exhibition, Silhouettes of Life, currently on view at the Easton Rooms, a show composed entirely of silhouette portraits. At first glance, it may seem a modest proposal: profiles in bold colors cut sharply against pale grounds, an 18th-century form revived with restraint. But to spend time with Bastion’s work is to experience a quiet drama unfold,one that explores identity, intimacy, and memory through what is left unseen.

The opening night was unusually subdued for a private view, the usual rush of art-scene chatter replaced by a slower, more contemplative pace. Visitors moved along the walls in near silence, pausing, doubling back, squinting slightly, as if attempting to read the portraits not just as likenesses but as ciphers. The works do not shout. They wait.

Each silhouette, rendered with a delicacy that belies its apparent simplicity, becomes a study in presence and absence. Bastion has modernised the form with digital interventions and colour. She stays close to the tradition but pushes at its edges. A few portraits include slight deviations,a loosened strand of hair, a tilted hat brim, a shoulder slightly turned. In these subtle shifts, whole personalities emerge. A child’s profile, its line wavering with a hint of restlessness, sits beside the stern geometry of an older man whose high collar and straight spine suggest formality,or perhaps fear.

The genius of the exhibition lies in its refusal to explain. None of the works are titled with names. Instead, the pieces carry dates, locations, or phrases: April, West Window, Three Years After, She Didn’t Speak That Day. These fragments lend the works a narrative texture, encouraging the viewer to fill the void between what is given and what is implied.

This is not nostalgia, though there is an echo of the past in Bastion’s method. Rather, it is something more searching: a meditation on how we remember people, and how much we can ever truly know of them. The silhouettes ask not just “Who is this?” but “What remains of a person when all detail is stripped away?”

It is telling that several visitors returned to the same portraits more than once during the evening, drawn back to the suggestive emptiness of each shape. The lack of facial expression, of decorative context becomes its own form of invitation,to imagine, to remember, to project.

Bastion, whose previous works leaned more heavily into figuration and soft realism, has here committed to a discipline that might seem restrictive. Yet in that limitation she has found something expansive. Silhouettes of Life is a moving and, at times, unsettling exhibition that asks much of its viewer,not in terms of interpretation, but in attention. It rewards slowness.

There is a reason silhouettes once carried the weight of portraiture before photography. They offer not likeness, but presence. Bastion understands this deeply, and in this poised, meticulously constructed show, she gives us a gallery full of lives not captured, but traced,and in the tracing, remembered.

Pacing Around the Question: On the (un) Importance of Art

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by an anonymous artist

There are days, increasingly frequent, when I sit in my studio,pale light, coffee gone cold, canvas looming with its customary indifference,and wonder whether any of this matters. Not the brushwork, nor the composition, nor the clever, brittle little statement I wrote for my last show about “material semiotics and the haptic residue of gesture.” That phrase earned a good review. But now it just hovers above my desk, written in pencil, mocking me with its precise vagueness.

Is art important?

There. I’ve said it aloud, or at least written it in italics, which is almost the same. A dangerous question for someone who has built an entire life, not to say income stream, upon its presumed importance.

When I was younger,by which I mean arrogant in a more excusable way,I would have quoted Adorno or Barthes at you. Something about rupture or aura, something hard-edged and continental. I believed, without question, that art revealed truths other disciplines only brushed against. It could provoke, disturb, soothe, reorder perception. It was a necessity, not an accessory.

Now, I am not so sure. The world seems increasingly impervious to metaphor. Paintings hang in white rooms while glaciers slide quietly into the sea. A video installation exploring grief plays on loop while governments flatten nuance into slogans. The dissonance is hard to ignore.

It’s not that I think art is irrelevant,not quite. But perhaps it is over-described, over-valorised, over-freighted with expectation. We want it to save us, or at the very least, to justify its square footage. But sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture. Sometimes an abstract painting is not a portal but an expensive silence.

And yet.

And yet I remember standing,was it in Florence, or Margate, or a college corridor somewhere?,before a small painting I had never seen before, and feeling briefly recalibrated. Not uplifted, exactly, but re-aligned. It offered no answers, but neither did it lie. That felt rare, and oddly merciful.

There is also, perhaps, the importance of making. Even if the world is unmoved, something happens in the act of arranging form and colour, of insisting that this, here, now, is worth paying attention to. That small, stubborn insistence may be its own argument.

Still, I remain unconvinced, which is not the same as disbelieving. Doubt, after all, is not an absence of faith, but its rigorous sibling.

I will keep painting, if only to see what happens. I will keep showing, if only because the lights are warm and someone always brings wine. And I will write again next month, when perhaps the pendulum will have swung one inch to the left, or I’ll have remembered a line from John Berger that restores my certainty for another week.

In the meantime, I hang my doubts neatly on the same hook as my apron. They dry slowly, like oil paint.

,An artist

Artist Diary: Abstract painter Ptolemy Bognor-Regis

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People often ask me what my paintings “mean,” and I, being an abstract painter with a classical name and a mild allergy to literalism, tend to answer with something like: “They mean what they resist.” This is a maddening response, I know. But abstraction is not there to comfort. It is there to interrupt.

I mainly work in a converted grain warehouse in Suffolk, where the light is sincere and unflattering. The walls are honest brick, and my studio is arranged according to no system I could explain to a rational adult: sketches on the ceiling, pigment samples tacked to the floor, one chair, and a radio tuned to a station I never enjoy. Clarity is the enemy of invention.

My recent series, “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather”, emerged during a particularly stormy winter. I began drawing rectangles,not the stoic, self-satisfied kind you find in mid-century modernism, but indecisive ones, collapsing at the corners, leaning into themselves. Colour came later: bruised yellows, bureaucratic greens, a red stolen from a 1950s Railway waiting room. These were not shapes of certainty. They were blueprints for internal architecture,plans for buildings that might be emotional, or possibly uninhabitable.

My influences shift constantly, as all good theft should. Agnes Martin, for her rigor and restraint; Malevich, for his audacity; and Etel Adnan, for showing that abstraction can be a kind of love letter to a mountain. I admire artists who understand that silence can be structural, and colour can argue without shouting.

People assume abstraction is cerebral, even cold. But for me, it is the most emotional form. When I paint, I am not making a statement,I am releasing one. Sometimes sadness arrives as a smear, sometimes as a crisp diagonal. I don’t always know which until months later, when someone else names it for me.

I don’t paint when I’m happy. I rearrange furniture or cook something unnecessarily elaborate. Happiness is circular, self-sufficient. It doesn’t need translating. Sadness, however, requires a syntax.

There is a kind of reluctant pleasure in the attention my work has lately received. The pieces I once stored in cupboards,because I didn’t trust them, or myself,now hang in galleries with proper lighting and clean floors. Critics write about my “rigorous emotional minimalism” and “subtle architectural unease.”

Fame, if we can call it that, is a peculiar byproduct. I don’t dislike it, but it’s like receiving applause for something you said in a whisper to yourself three years ago. Still, I’m grateful. Not for the recognition per se, but for the fact that people are willing to spend time with something that doesn’t give answers. That feels rare now.

And so, I continue,drawing uncertain lines in precise configurations, layering colour until it loses its first language, and trying, always, to build a space that holds a feeling without describing it.

(Selected works from “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather” will be on display at Pimlico Wilde Central later in the year.)

The Curator in Search of a Subject

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by Margerie Hinche

There is something faintly paradoxical,almost tragicomic,about a curator without a subject. A painter can paint. A sculptor can carve. A composer can hum tunelessly until inspiration arrives. But a curator, that most elusive of creative professionals, needs something to curate. Without objects, ideas, or at the very least a thematic scaffold, they are like a lighthouse with no ships, blinking nobly into the fog.

I recently spent a long afternoon with Lukas Bellamy, one of the more interesting curators to emerge from London’s fiercely theoretical art scene of the early 2010s. Bellamy, now in his late 30s and dressed like an archivist disguised as an 18th century locomotive driver (charcoal linen, many pockets), has been without a formal exhibition project for nearly two years. His last show, After the Afterimage,a kind of speculative archaeology of failed technologies and almost-inventions,garnered real attention. Then came the silence.

“The art world,” he told me over nettle tea in a gallery café that neither of us were affiliated with, “is full of content. Too much, really. But so little of it is curatable.”

What he meant, is that the presence of things is not enough. The role of the curator, in his view, is to make meaning, not merely to arrange. Bellamy is allergic to exhibitions that read like Pinterest boards: “Show me a show called Soft Ruptures and I guarantee it’s just ceramics and wall text.” He wants stakes. Friction. Contexts colliding like tectonic plates. “Curation should be an argument, not a mood.”

The Search

Since 2023, Bellamy has been wandering,intellectually and literally. He’s visited artists in Eindhoven and sheep farmers in Northumberland. He spent three months in Athens trying to reconstruct the exhibition habits of minor Byzantine saints. He attended a blockchain art fair in Lisbon and left halfway through a panel titled Decentralising Curation: Towards an AI-Praxis.

Mostly, he’s been walking. Thinking. Reading shipping manifests, recipes, city zoning records. His notebooks are full of abortive ideas:

• “The Aesthetics of Partial Completion”

• “Everything That Is Mislabelled in the British Museum”

• “Forms of Waiting in Rural Infrastructure”

• “Exhibition of Only the Backs of Paintings”

• “Artworks Touched by David Hockney”

Some are whimsical. Others quietly brilliant. But none, he says, has yet formed “the spine of a show.” It is not that there is no art. It is that there is no frame through which the art becomes meaningfully public.

The Curatorial Condition

Bellamy’s situation is more common than many realise. We are used to seeing curators as cultural engineers,decisive, thematic, multilingual. But behind the scenes, many of them are,if not lost,then certainly unmoored. As art has become more global, more digital, and more continuous (there is no longer an “off-season”), the curator’s role has become at once more essential and more obscure.

They are no longer just “choosers of objects.” They are mediators, theorists, bureaucrats, diplomats, narrators, and in some cases,tragically,event planners. The more exhibitions proliferate, the more pressure there is to say something new, even as that something must also be fundable, installable, reviewable, and shareable on Instagram.

“The great challenge,” Bellamy told me, “is finding a form of curation that doesn’t merely illustrate a concept, but produces it.”

What Next?

For now, Bellamy continues to look. He’s intrigued by neglected art storage facilities,“the climate-controlled unconscious of the art world”,and recently visited one in Poland where a crate marked simply “CHESS, CONCRETE” caught his attention. He has written to the institution to inquire.

When I asked what success would look like, he paused.

“I want to curate an exhibition that answers a question nobody asked,” he said, “but that, once asked, they cannot stop thinking about.”

Until then, the curator remains in search of a subject. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of exhibition,one not yet built, but already quietly unfolding.

If you are interested in Bellamy curating a show at your museum or gallery please get in touch.