Art Diary

A Review of Thresholds & Other Minor Catastrophes at Pimlico Wilde East

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This review of our latest exhibition by Frances Tood first appeared in the New Welsh Review of Art and is republished here with permission.

Walk into the latest show at Pimlico Wilde East and you are greeted by two sculptures, one that appears to be a collapsed stepladder and another – created from betting slips and share certificates – that might be a critique of late-stage capitalism.

The exhibition brings together eight contemporary artists united by their interest in edges, limits, doors, walls – boundaries and what happens when you gently push past them.

A piece one encounters in Room 1 is Jasper Lute’s Door #5, a doorway made entirely of hand-poured resin and what smells like barbecued marshmallows, freestanding and, crucially, leading nowhere. A small plaque urges viewers to “consider thresholds as social fictions,” which is either very deep or nonsense.

To the left, in a dimly lit alcove, we find the video installation Feedback Loop (I Forgot My Password) by Sonna Sánchez,nineteen minutes of a woman trying to log into an email account while being slowly buried in confetti. “It’s about identity erosion in the digital age,” Sánchez explained in the press preview, though I have to admit I am unsure how.

The exhibition plays with sensory discomfort in ways that are as philosophical as they are irritating. Take the olfactory piece Smell #3: Anticipation, a collaboration between scent artist Wez Zhu and an anonymous perfumer known only as ‘Clifton’. The test tube emits a faint aroma of damp wool with overtones of apricot and orange. When I asked Zhu about the piece, she replied, “Really it is a memory of something that never happened, but probably should have.” I nodded, as though I understood.

In the back room is a piece that has already attracted more than its share of Instagram posts: Duvet of Uncertainty by Sonny Marr. A vast, overstuffed bedding form that droops from the ceiling like a failed attempt at comfort, it invites viewers to crawl beneath and “listen to the sound of 7,000 unread emails being softly deleted.” I did, and found it surprisingly calming.

One cannot overlook the presence of Administrative Vortex, a wall-length oil-painted spreadsheet by civil servant-turned-artist Gill Peale. Columns of imagined bureaucratic tasks are printed on archival paper and connected by twine to a cat wearing a tiny harness. “I wanted to show the entanglement of systems and how they eventually find a way to escape,” Peale said. The cat slept.

The atmosphere at the opening was tense, with attendees murmuring disapprovingly into plastic cups of kombucha. I overheard one man say, “It’s like late Derrida meets Brexit anxiety,” and a woman nearby replied, “Yes, but with more felt.” I couldn’t agree more.

Overall, Thresholds & Other Minor Catastrophes delivers exactly what it promises: art that doesn’t solve your problems but instead rephrases them in ways that feel both beautiful and lightly accusatory. You leave unsure whether you’ve witnessed something profound or a little trite ,but in today’s cultural climate, that may be the point.

4.5 out of 5

Exhibition runs through August 12. Souvenir tote bags are available.

Sir Kelley Sorne to join Pimlico Wilde

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We are pleased to announce that Sir Kelley Sorne is to join Pimlico Wilde. He will have responsibility for our North Pole art gallery, Pimlico Polar, as well as sharing with us his expertise in Inuit collage. He will also be developing his own list of artists, concentrating on Laplandism, the little known movement of artists working in the medium of fish paste, from circa 1876.

Apologies – our North Pole Gallery will not be the first

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We have been referring to Pimlico Polar, our art gallery planned to open at the North Pole later this year as the the world’s first polar gallery.

However we have received a letter informing us that this is not the case. We would like to apologise and acknowledge that a gallery did exist for a few years at the North Pole during the last century.

We print the entire letter below.

To Whom It May Concern at Pimlico Wilde,

I write with what I can only describe as a mixture of polite astonishment and absolute fury upon reading of your recent and widely publicised claim to be “opening the world’s first contemporary art gallery at the North Pole.” While I applaud the ambition, I must,firmly and with considerable historical authority,correct the record.

I, Sir Kelley Sorne, established the Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms at precisely 89°59′46″N in the spring of 1934. It was, in every measurable sense, the first gallery at the North Pole. That you have not heard of it speaks more to the art world’s amnesia than to the significance of the enterprise itself.

Allow me to educate.

My gallery was a modest but dignified structure,timber-framed, canvas-roofed, and insulated with whale blubber against the cold nights. It stood alone, glinting nobly amid the snowdrifts, a temple to human expression perched on the roof of the Earth. We exhibited abstraction before abstraction was fashionable, including a magnificent series of ice-etchings by a Latvian mystic named Dobroslav, whose fingers later froze in the act of creating a piece entitled North Pole No. 63.

We showed, too, the early work of Ivor Miskin,once hailed as “the Malevich of the Cold”,including his controversial White Square on White Horizon, which was indistinguishable from the view from the window.

Sales were modest. Our only regular visitor was a Swedish cartographer who bought several linocuts of seals wearing amusing clothes. Financing came from a brief but intense sponsorship by a Norwegian fishpaste consortium, whose board eventually lost interest after one of their directors was mildly insulted by an installation involving dried haddock.

As to why the gallery closed,well, there are only so many months a man can explain to patrons that the gallery is “closed owing to the weather”. In the end, the roof collapsed under the weight of a disgruntled walrus. The final exhibition, Melting Points: Hope and Sadness in Ice, was both poorly attended and, badly water-damaged.

So no, Arctica Contemporary is not the “first.” You are, at best, the second. Possibly third if one counts the brief Inuit collective that exhibited sealskin collages on a drifting ice shelf in 1908, which I do.

I ask only that you adjust your language accordingly. Perhaps “first commercial art gallery at the North Pole founded during a climate crisis by people in designer snowwear.” That would be more accurate.

Yours in cold but resolute truth,

Sir Kelley Sorne, FRSA, OBE, Former Director, The Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms

Somewhere off the Norfolk coast, watching the tide, and remembering better days

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?

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

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.

Is an Old Painting Recently Found in Fulham by Michelangelo?

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Is an Old Painting Recently Found in Fulham by Michelangelo?

Art World in Frenzy

A recently unearthed painting found wedged behind a fuse box in the basement of a terraced house in Fulham has sparked feverish speculation in art circles, with some daring to ask: could this be an unknown work by Michelangelo himself?

The small oil painting, measuring approximately 40cm x 30cm, depicts a muscular figure reclining against what appears to be a cracked column, gazing mournfully at a bowl of overripe pears. The canvas was discovered during renovation works by homeowner Olivia Trent, who had originally planned to convert the basement into a Pilates studio.

Speculation exploded after a local antiques dealer posted an image of the painting on social media with the caption “Lost Michelangelo?” Within hours, self-declared art sleuths descended on Fulham, clutching UV lights and waving around copies of The Lives of the Artists like sacred scrolls.

Dr. Lionel Corbusier of the South Kensington Institute for Unverified Masterpieces believes the composition bears “an undeniable emotional weight, an echo of the Sistine Chapel’s Adam, if Adam had slightly longer hair and a more questionable understanding of perspective.” He adds, “There’s a majesty in the brushwork, albeit hidden under thick layers of dust, but it could be an early work by the master.”

Even more tantalising: carbon dating of the wood panel places its origin in the early 16th century. And a faint, nearly illegible signature in the bottom corner reads either “Michel Angelo” or “Michael Andrews”.

However, not everyone is convinced.

“This is not by Michelangelo. It’s not even by Michelangelo’s dog walker’s cousin’s apprentice,” said Gloria Haversham, curator of Early Renaissance Art at the Royal Hove and Borough Museum. “It looks like a schoolboy’s art project on a hot Friday afternoon,probably after his mum told him he couldn’t go to the park until he finished something for class.”

She added, “The anatomy is questionable, the shading is confused, and I’m fairly certain that the bruise on the left wrist is actually a poorly rendered digital watch.”

Despite the scepticism, the painting,already nicknamed The Fulham David,will go on display at a pop-up exhibition in a converted newsagent off North End Road. Tickets are £44.50 or free with proof of recent pasta purchase from the adjoining Italian deli.

Whether it’s the lost work of a Renaissance master or the artistic tantrum of a Year 9 student, one thing is clear: the Fulham painting has already earned a place in the pantheon of delightful art world mysteries…