Art Diary

A Day in the Life of: Thaddeus Quince, Collector

by

In a Georgian townhouse tucked into a moss-soft crescent of Bath, England, lives a man who believes that dust is not the enemy of art but its twin. Thaddeus Quince,bibliophile, antiquarian, occasional essayist in The Belgravia Collectors’ Magazine,has spent the better part of four decades assembling one of Britain’s most peculiar and whisper-worthy private collections: an archive of proto-Surrealist and hermetic art from the 16th to 20th centuries, largely ignored by mainstream institutions and entirely untouched by fashion.

His day begins with the slow unfurling of ritual. At 7:10 AM, Quince dons a heavy wool dressing gown, takes a single black coffee, and enters the “Cabinet,” a narrow, temperature-controlled study whose contents defy simple categorization. There are engravings of alchemical emblems, inked diagrams from long-defunct secret societies, reliquaries embedded with what may or may not be human teeth. Above his desk hangs an early Max Ernst collage next to a 17th-century Dutch vanitas painting of a decomposing book.

He has no staff. “A collection,” he has written, “should never be mediated by another man’s gloves.” Every morning, Quince selects a single object to sit with. It might be a gouache by Leonor Fini, or a charred manuscript attributed (dubiously) to a Carmelite visionary. He does not rush the viewing. He believes artworks, like bears and theologians, must be approached sidelong.

Professionally, Thaddeus is nominally retired from his career as a consultant to major auction houses and provenance research units, but he remains an informal advisor to several European museums that specialize in esoterica and marginalia. He also holds an unpaid fellowship at All Souls College, Harpenden, where he lectures irregularly on “Symbolist Hysteria and the Politics of the Gaze.” These days, his income derives from careful sales,never public,of select pieces from his early collections to discreet buyers, often academics or eccentric aristocrats.

By late morning, Quince writes. Always in longhand, on paper made from hemp and flax. His essays are dense, footnoted, and utterly indifferent to readability. His latest draft explores the overlap between Finnish mystic painters of the 1890s and Jungian dream symbology. He claims it’s only for himself, but colleagues whisper that the British Museum is keen to publish his collected writings under the title Uncertain Icons: Essays from the Edge of the Image.

Lunch is sparse,usually poached eggs with horseradish and anchovies, consumed in the back garden beneath a 300-year-old fig tree. If it is raining, he eats beside a mummified crocodile in the drawing room.

Afternoons are often reserved for correspondence. Quince writes long letters,to curators, occult historians, print dealers in Prague. He avoids email entirely. “Digital correspondence lacks the gravity of time,” he says. “It is too impatient to matter.” Once a week, he visits the Bath Central Library, not to borrow books, but to browse the shelves of discarded volumes. He claims he once found a signed Austin Osman Spare in the bin.

Social visits are rare, though he occasionally receives guests,usually graduate students seeking obscure references, or aging collectors hoping to trade something forgotten for something less so. He offers tea, but never wine. “Alcohol disrupts the line between aesthetic reverie and self-deception.”

By 6:00 PM, Thaddeus retreats into the “Red Room,” where his most precious and difficult works reside. These include a 1922 charcoal triptych by Czech artist Milena Pavlíková,rumored to have been banned from three exhibitions for inducing fainting spells,and a wax sculpture by an unnamed French asylum patient, displayed in a glass vitrine beside an open volume of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

In the evening, Quince reads. Not fiction, never memoir. Only treatises: medieval cosmology, obsolete anthropological texts, Renaissance demonographies. His mind, as one critic put it, “lives in the footnotes of forgotten empires.” Music is rare, but when present, it is played from shellac records on a hand-cranked phonograph,Gregorian chant or early Russian liturgical drones.

He goes to bed just past midnight, after a final viewing of one “difficult” work,often something deliberately obscured or disturbing. “Art,” he murmurs, “ought to dislodge the soul a little before sleep.”

In an age addicted to the visible and the verified, Thaddeus Quince remains a defender of the obscure, the haunted, the almost-lost. His is not the life of a collector, but of a custodian,of art that resists clarity, and of beauty that trembles just beyond comprehension.

Diary of an Artist – Anonymous, London

by

1st August, 2025

Woke up at 2:47pm with a hangover and a mouth that felt like I’d been licking sandpaper. The studio was thick with heat and turpentine; the fan’s broken again, just hums like it’s trying to remember how to turn. I lay there staring at the water stains on the ceiling, tracing faces in them. One of them looked like my mother. Another like that girl in the caff.

Last night I tried to finish the painting I’ve been avoiding for weeks,the one with the girl and the cigarette and the look like she’s already left the room. I added a stroke of ochre across her cheek and immediately hated it. Scraped it back down to canvas. Again and again. Sometimes I think I only paint to have something to destroy.

Got a message from a gallery intern in Berlin who “loves the rawness” of my work and wants to show it in their “emergent artists” group show. They’re offering “exposure.” I told them to expose themselves to traffic. Didn’t send it, obviously. Just thought it.

Rents due. I have £16 in my account. I’ve stopped checking it. The landlord texted a question mark, just that. Cryptic and menacing. Art dealer as haiku.

Saw Jules outside the café on Rye Lane. She asked if I was still painting “that heartbreak stuff.” I laughed. Said it’s all heartbreak, even the abstracts. She looked tired, beautiful. Said I should come to her gig. I probably won’t. People make too much noise now. I can’t tell if I’m getting old or just giving up.

The sky looked like it was about to fall open tonight,burnt peach and acid pink, like it was bleeding out. I took a photo. Deleted it. Didn’t feel real enough.

I still haven’t named the painting. Maybe I won’t. Maybe it’ll just stay unfinished, like everything I try to love.

-X

The Ontology of the Left Shoe in 17th-Century Portraiture

by

By Dr. Lionel Cavendish-Smythe | Lecturer in Symbolic Aesthetics, University of St. Ives & Hove

The history of Western portraiture is, by and large, a history of faces: expressions, gazes, coiffures, and the conspicuous placement of rings, robes, or regalia. Yet beneath these grand visual gestures lies an often-ignored, unassuming but persistently present detail: the left foot, frequently,though not always,shod.

In a remarkable number of 17th-century aristocratic and mercantile portraits, one finds the left shoe peeking forward, extended just enough to catch the viewer’s attention without entirely demanding it. This essay will argue that the left shoe is not merely a compositional flourish, nor an accident of pose, but a semiotic device,a footnote, quite literally, in the ontology of identity.

I. A Gentle Lunge Toward Posterity

The placement of the left foot slightly forward in full-body portraits, particularly among Dutch and English sitters, may first appear to stem from painterly convention: it opens the body, creates dynamism, avoids bilateral stiffness. Yet this compositional convention repeatedly favours the left foot over the right. Why?

We must consider the symbolic valence of “leftness” in early modern thought. The left was long associated with disorder, intuition, otherness,and in religious contexts, even sin. And yet, in these paintings, the left foot is given pride of place. Not the “noble” right foot, but its shadowed twin, tentatively presented to the world.

This may suggest that the sitter is offering the self not as already whole and resolved, but as ambivalent, unfolding. The forward left shoe becomes an ontological marker of becoming, rather than being.

II. Shoe as Sovereignty

Portraits of aristocratic men,particularly those influenced by the Spanish Habsburg court,often depict the sitter with an ornate, even effeminate left shoe thrust forward, sometimes absurdly so. In Portrait of a Flemish Nobleman in a Slashed Doublet (c. 1641), the left foot is so prominent it borders on anatomical protest.

Here, the shoe serves not only as adornment but as territory. The extended foot claims space, like a personal peninsula extending into the viewer’s domain. But again: why the left?

One theory lies in courtly etiquette manuals, which often instructed the subject to approach superiors or sacred spaces with the left foot first,a gesture of humility and intent. Thus, the painted forward left shoe paradoxically blends dominance and deference, a foot poised between conquest and courtesy.

III. The Ontological Footprint

The left foot, especially when adorned with an elaborate buckle or ribbon, becomes a quiet signature, a declaration of selfhood at the margins of the canvas. Unlike the hands or face, which are performative and socially coded, the foot,particularly the left one,remains grounded, subtle, almost unconscious.

In some portraits, the left foot appears with slight imperfections: scuffed leather, an untied lace, a crooked angle. These may be mistakes, or they may be the sitter (or painter) asserting a truth claim,an ontological gesture that says, “I am not merely my regalia. I am my imbalance, my awkwardness, my leftness.”

IV. Case Study: The Anxious Dandy

In the 1662 English portrait Gentleman in Blue with Spaniel and Pained Expression, attributed to the school of Peter Lely, the left shoe protrudes awkwardly beyond the hem of the doublet. It is noticeably too small. This disproportion has troubled art historians for decades.

Recent psychosemiotic analysis suggests that the ill-fitting shoe is a coded representation of the sitter’s discomfort with inheritance,both familial and epistemological. The left shoe, unable to contain the foot, becomes a metaphor for inherited status chafing against individual ontology.

V. Conclusion: Stepping Out of the Frame

In an era when identity was framed (literally) by oil, canvas, and lineage, the left shoe allowed for a subtle but profound intervention. It is the body’s murmur of subjectivity, a gentle whisper of dissent from the obedient mirror of portraiture.

To walk into history, it seems, one did not lead with the right foot, but the left.

And so we must ask not only what these figures faced, but what they stepped toward,and why, more often than not, they did so in an exquisitely rendered, gently awkward left shoe.

Ipswich Fine Art Weekend: A Bold Brushstroke Toward Art-World Relevance

by

Once considered a pleasant if sleepy waypoint between Colchester and the sea, Ipswich has made an audacious play for the art-world spotlight with its inaugural Fine Art Weekend,a sprawling, somewhat chaotic attempt to catapult the town into the upper echelons of cultural destinations. Whether it succeeded depends largely on how one defines success,and one’s tolerance for conceptual installation art in a former Debenhams.

The organisers, calling themselves The Ipswich Ascension Committee, promised “a reimagination of Ipswich as an emergent global art node,” and the results were as ambitious as they were unpredictable. What the weekend occasionally lacked in polish, it more than made up for in sheer artistic enthusiasm, logistical daring, and the undeniable thrill of watching local teenagers try to interpret a video installation projected onto a duck pond.

The Venues

Rather than relying solely on white cube galleries, the weekend took a more egalitarian approach to exhibition space. Art spilled out across unexpected corners of the town: a conceptual puppet opera staged in the upstairs of a pizza restaurant; a collection of post-industrial ceramics displayed in the window of a closed shoe repair shop; and a sculpture trail that threaded through the town’s medieval graveyard, culminating in a motion-activated fog machine called Whispers of the Fens.

The old Corn Exchange hosted the festival’s centrepiece show, East Is the New West, which featured regional and international artists addressing with great intelligence, peripheral centrality and agrarian longing. Highlights included a series of paintings of A15 service stations rendered in the colours of the ecclesiastical seasons, and a performance piece in which an artist from Rotterdam attempted to knit a copy of the River Orwell using locally sourced eco-wool made from fern fibres.

The Art

The quality of the work varied, as one might expect from an open-call festival with a noble mandate and limited funding. Still, there were bright sparks throughout. Local painter Marla Crook impressed with her massive triptych Three Views of a Rental Spoon, which envisaged a world where cutlery is rented by the hour. Meanwhile, experimental sculptor Eustace Wimble presented Ipswich: A Soft Power Diagram, a piece made of discarded fortune cookies papers and a vending machine that dispensed quotes from Derrida.

In a disused car park near the station, a group of recent art school graduates from Norwich staged an “immersive urban experience” involving chalk outlines, borrowed traffic cones, and a soundtrack composed entirely of sirens.

The Vibe

The weekend struck a tone somewhere between biennale and village fête. There were Prosecco vans. There were local historians offering fiercely detailed walking tours of sites tangentially connected to John Constable. There was a moment when two avant-garde drummers and a Morris dancing troupe overlapped acoustically on Dial Lane, creating what one attendee called “a collision of epochs and percussion.”

Crucially, the people of Ipswich showed up,in numbers and with good humour. Retired couples gazed gamely at conceptual installations. Teenagers skulked artfully. A woman in her 80s gave a blistering critique of a piece involving taxidermy and found poetry, declaring it “both pretentious and slightly unnecessary.”

Final Thoughts

Was the Ipswich Fine Art Weekend perfect? No. But was it alive? Absolutely. It was full of risk, charm, mud, and minor revelations.

Ipswich may not be Venice or Basel just yet. But if the town keeps this up,embracing its peculiarities, and its edge-of-the-map charisma,it might just carve out a place for itself among the UK’s more idiosyncratic art destinations.

And honestly, who needs the Serpentine when you’ve got a rap performance of King Lear in a Lorry Park?

Review: Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes

by

Shortlisted for the Llandudno Art Prize 2025

Doodle Pip has never been an easy artist to summarise. Known mainly for his portraits, he also undertakes elliptical performances and theoretical pranksterism, for example a 2023 installation that consisted entirely of QR codes projected onto Buckingham Palace. He now returns with a film so tightly coiled, so self-consciously compressed, it might be the most Pipian work to date.

Titled Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes, the work clocks in , naturally , at exactly nine minutes, though it feels both longer and shorter, depending on which part of your brain you’re watching it with.

Time is a Lie, and Pip is Here to Prove It

Shot on what appears to be 1990s DV tape, 35mm film, a GoPro attached to a snail, and possibly CCTV footage from a dentist’s waiting room, the film begins with a ticking clock , or at least an impression of one. The second hand jerks, then stutters, then speeds up, then disappears. This is your warning: we’re in Doodle Pip territory now, where linear time is more of a rumour than a structure.

A woman narrates the history of an abandoned French amusement park backward.

A man recites a list of missed appointments alphabetically.

An unseen voice apologises continuously for “running late” while the screen displays the word “punctuality” in a dozen fonts.

There’s a moment, roughly five minutes in where the screen briefly goes white. A breath. A pause. Viewers in the screening room glanced at each other. Was it over? Had we been tricked?

No. Doodle Pip returns with a thudding burst of static and a digital calendar flipping furiously through decades. Just as the film’s duration approaches nine minutes suddenly the screen fills with the message, “Ten minutes, well spent.”

Conceptual Maximalism, Minimal Runtime

Though brief, Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is a dense, multi-layered assault on time, memory, and the productivity-industrial complex. You get the sense that every second was negotiated like real estate in Manhattan. Pip has somehow created a work that actively resists being watched casually , it demands your full presence, then quietly mocks you for giving it.

It’s not “difficult” in the traditional avant-garde sense , there are no long shots of a car rusting or inexplicable Icelandic motifs (though there is a recurring image of a melting parking meter). Rather, it’s the speed of the piece that destabilises. The brain is forced to do interpretive gymnastics. There’s no space for comfort, only compression.

In a way, it’s a perfect piece for our times:

• Overstimulated.

• Chronically running behind.

• Obsessed with squeezing the maximum out of the minimum.

The Final Frame: Or Is It?

The last second is a simple black screen with white Helvetica text:

“There was enough time.”

As the lights come up, there was an audible exhale from the audience. One viewer muttered, “I want to watch it again,” and I heard another add insincerely, “Yeah, but backwards.”

Verdict

Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is not just a film , it’s an experiment in perceptual elasticity, a cleverly disorienting meditation on how we experience art, attention, and our own vanishing hours. It’s short, sharp, and somehow sprawling , a conceptual joke delivered with unnerving sincerity.

Beyond the Banana: A Review of the Exmouth Academy’s Brazil Painting Show

by

The Exmouth Academy’s much-anticipated exhibition, “Brushstrokes of Brazil: Liminal Vibrancy in the Tropics”, promises a deep dive into the nation’s contemporary painting scene. What it delivers, however, is a kaleidoscopic fever dream of artistic ambition, chaotic juxtapositions, and more references to post-colonial discourse than even the most ardent political junkie could digest.

I arrived expecting an immersive exploration of the Brazilian psyche via paint. What I encountered was an exhibition that seemed determined to answer the question: “What if we put samba, existential dread, and Rousseau’s jungle fantasies into a blender and forgot to put the lid on?”

The Works

At the heart of the show is a tension between Brazil’s lush, visceral aesthetic heritage and its artists’ relentless pursuit of conceptual complexity. Take, for instance, “O Sol Nunca Me Ama” (The Sun Never Loves Me) by João Cordeiro. This monumental canvas features a hyper-realistic avocado sliced open to reveal a yawning void, its edges inexplicably smeared with gold leaf. A metaphor for globalization? A critique of Brazil’s agricultural dependence? Or just an homage to brunch culture gone wrong? The accompanying wall text,a 650-word manifesto,was as opaque as the pitless avocado itself.

Further along, Larissa Tavares’s “Palimpsesto das Favelas” (Palimpsest of the Favelas) arrests the eye with its maddening refusal to cohere. Tavares layers gauzy washes of color with bursts of angry, abstract scribbles, over which she has collaged what appear to be receipts for pão de queijo. “It’s an interrogation of neoliberal transactionalism,” I overheard one visitor murmur, stroking their chin. But to me, it felt like someone spilled their lunch money on a Jackson Pollock.

And then there’s “Ode ao Mosquito” (Ode to the Mosquito) by Beatriz de Lima, an installation masquerading as a painting. The artist has smeared actual mosquito blood across a stark white canvas while a recording of buzzing drones from the ceiling speakers. It’s a visceral and deeply irritating piece, which I suspect is exactly the point. “The mosquitoes are both the colonizers and the colonized,” one particularly verbose guide explained. “They are the oppressors, yet also victims of the climate crisis. It’s genius.”

The Themes

The show’s overarching curatorial narrative,if one can find it in the chaos,is an attempt to distill Brazil’s artistic identity into something both contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition. This is, of course, an impossible task, and the exhibition doesn’t so much tackle the challenge as gleefully revel in its impossibility.

You’ll find nods to Brazil’s colonial past in nearly every piece, often juxtaposed with jarringly modern elements. One painting featured a meticulously rendered 18th-century sugar mill but dotted with QR codes. When scanned, they directed me to a Spotify playlist featuring only Bossa Nova remixes of the Macarena. Bold? Yes. Meaningful? Perhaps. Overwhelming? Absolutely.

There’s also a distinct sense of ecological urgency running through the works, with many artists addressing deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the commodification of the Amazon. But rather than hammering the viewer with doom, the exhibition opts for a more playful (if baffling) approach. One standout was “Desmatamento #4”, in which artist Raul Pessoa used actual tree sap mixed with acrylics to paint what appeared to be a melancholy toucan smoking a cigarette.

The Experience

The layout of the show is as confounding as the art itself. The gallery walls are painted a deep, pulsating pink,presumably meant to evoke the Brazilian sunset but more reminiscent of a nightclub. Meanwhile, the lighting is erratic, shifting between dim, jungle-like greens and harsh fluorescent whites. At one point, I accidentally walked into what I thought was another room of paintings but turned out to be a live capoeira demonstration. Whether this was intentional or simply an unfortunate scheduling overlap remains unclear.

By the time I reached the gift shop (featuring eco-friendly caipirinha kits and tote bags with the phrase “Art is the Amazon of the Soul”), I felt both intellectually exhilarated and vaguely unmoored.

The Verdict

“Brushstrokes of Brazil” is a triumph of contradictions. It’s a show where beauty and bewilderment collide, where the line between profundity and pretension is gloriously blurred. The paintings might not all resonate, and some might outright baffle, but the exhibition achieves something rare: it forces you to think. Or at least to pretend you’re thinking while desperately googling “symbolism of bananas in post-modern Brazilian art.”

Go see it. Bring an open mind, a willingness to be confused, and, ideally, bug spray.

Who Was Sellario Mounteback, and Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Him?

by

Until recently, the name Sellario Mounteback was known only to a handful of dusty academics, Renaissance eccentrics, and the curator of one particularly damp museum in Cherbourg. But this month, the long-obscure painter has become the subject of feverish headlines, art market mayhem, and an unsolved pub-based mystery , all thanks to the theft of one of his rare paintings from an East London pub during a toilet break gone wrong.

So who was Sellario Mounteback? Why are collectors, critics, and inebriated pub-goers suddenly obsessed with him? And was he even real?

Let’s unpack the mystique.

A Shadowy Figure of the Early 1500s

Little is known about Mounteback’s life. Born sometime between 1480 and 1490, most likely in Normandy or Juan les Pins, Mounteback worked during the tail end of the French Gothic period, drifting into the early Renaissance like a misplaced troubadour with a darkened palette.

What we do know comes from marginal records in Cherbourg and a 1542 clerical note that reads:

“One Sellario M., paid 3 sous for painting of Saint Lawrence. Price reduced owing to the Saint’s unsettlingly cheerful expression.”

He may have studied under more prominent artists in Rouen or Bruges, though evidence is mostly circumstantial and derived from chalk marks on the backs of cupboards in art studios in Rouen. Regardless, Mounteback was active during a brief but prolific 20-year window, producing portraits, devotional panels, and the occasional mural.

Why the Sudden Attention?

Enter the recent rediscovery of The Third St Veronica (With Sparrow) , a small oil-on-oak painting depicting St Veronica holding a handkerchief with the face of Christ, while a sparrow (possibly symbolic, possibly just nosy) perches nearby. Art historians were abuzz when the piece, long assumed lost or fictional, turned up in private hands in London this year.

Unfortunately, it was then left with a stranger in the Phoenix and Fire pub while the owner used the loo, and subsequently stolen , an event that somehow made Mounteback more famous than ever.

“People weren’t interested when he was in the Louvre’s storeroom,” said Dr. Eloise Farquarson, an art historian at UCL. “But the moment his painting was taken by an unnamed man during a Thursday evening pub quiz night, the entire market woke up.”

His Work: Melancholy, Muddy, and Mysteriously Moving

Mounteback’s style is described as proto-mannerist, with murky colour palettes, overlong fingers, and expressions that range from pious resignation to “deeply suspicious of the viewer.”

His best-known surviving works include:

• “Squire Daveux With Two Left Feet” (Musée des Larmes, Cherbourg)

• “Saints Misnumbered” , a devotional piece where there appear to be either five or seven saints, depending on how you count the legs

• “The Melancholy Market Seller (Possibly His Wife)” , currently on long-term loan to the Dutch Museum of Market-based Art

Only 14 works are firmly attributed to Mounteback, though several dozen “Mounteback-adjacent” pieces continue to surface in estate sales, fire-damaged churches, and recently, a Pizza Hut in Madrid.

A Cult Following Grows

Collectors now refer to Mounteback’s paintings as “the lost links between the early and mid-Rinascimento.” TikTok has embraced him too: #MountebackMystery has over 3 million views, mostly reenactments of the infamous pub theft, and teenagers offering to look after people’s valuables whilst they go to the loo.

Was He Real? Was He a Hoax?

Some fringe theorists (and at least one Channel 79 documentary) have speculated that Sellario Mounteback might be a historical fiction , a prankster invented by 18th-century collectors to fill gaps in French Renaissance catalogues.

Others believe he was a misunderstood genius, overshadowed by more famous names but destined for rediscovery.

And some believe the painting was never really stolen, but part of a new conceptual piece, possibly orchestrated by an artist known as Bingo, who has been suspiciously quiet since the incident.

What’s Next for Mounteback?

Sellario Mounteback is now undeniably having a moment. His few known works are under heavy security. Auction prices have skyrocketed. And a Netflix miniseries , The Master of Cherbourg: Lost, Loathed, Legendary , is reportedly in production.

In the meantime, if you consider asking someone in your local pub to watch your parcel as you go to the loo because it contains a priceless Mounteback , perhaps think twice. Or at the very least, ask for ID.

A quick survey of upcoming exhibitions in London

by

1. Stillness in Orbit: The Slow Modernities of Ellinor Cade

Venue: Saville Row Gallery

Dates: 2 September , 19 November 2025

An exquisite and near-completist retrospective of Ellinor Cade’s oeuvre, Stillness in Orbit excavates her lifelong obsession with arrested motion – dust motes, satellite drift, the overlooked inertia of a revolving door. Installations include rotating lenticular sculptures powered by visitors’ breath, and a 12-minute video of a moth circling a chandelier in an abandoned Georgian bathhouse. The accompanying catalogue essay by Dr. Penelope Voss is a minor treatise on Stillness and is this month’s recommended read.

We are lucky enough to have been allowed to publish the essay here.

2. The Grammar of Smoke: Reconstructing the Aether Archive

Venue: Victor Dressel Institute of Contemporary Art

Dates: 14 August , 30 October 2025

Part speculative archaeology, part olfactory essay, this group exhibition imagines the lost art of 19th-century “aether drawing” , ephemeral sketches made by manipulating smoke within glass domes. Using reconstructed apparatuses and pseudo-scientific notation, participating artists (including Lin Xue, Ariya Hossain, and Theodore Jemmett) reanimate forgotten rituals of sensory documentation. Visitors are invited to inhale curated scent-clouds while listening to field recordings of delicate coughing.

3. Eva Demarch: Misfiled Bodies

Venue: The Cardman Institute

Dates: 28 July , 4 November 2025

With chilling intellectual precision, Eva Demarch interrogates the bureaucracies of embodiment through a forensic re-staging of misplaced anatomical drawings from obscure 17th-century anatomy catalogues. Graphite, vellum, and bureaucratic error congeal into a conceptual autopsy of taxonomy. The centrepiece: a twelve-metre scroll titled Index of Imagined Organs, composed entirely of miscatalogued spleens. A must-see for connoisseurs of bureaucracy.

4. Florilegium Reversed: The Botanic Unbecoming in Contemporary Sculpture

Venue: Camden Botanica & Visual Arts Pavilion (CBVAP)

Dates: 4 September , 12 December 2025

This horticulturally-inclined exhibition inverts the classical florilegium, placing decay and vegetal subversion at the heart of the curatorial thesis. Organic matter , bruised lilies, rhubarb skeletons, and creeping lichen , cohabit with bronze casts and biodegradable resins. Notable is Clara Yeoh’s Portrait of a Wilt, a slowly imploding peony encased in alginate. An exquisite meditation on the transience of botanical categorisation.

5. Henrik van der Meel: The Architecture of Pause

Venue: Exhibition Road North

Dates: 18 October 2025 , 29 January 2026

Van der Meel, the reclusive Dutch “interval architect,” constructs a series of non-functional corridors, false foyers, and anti-rooms inside the Exhibition Road North wing. Visitors are required to navigate the exhibition through a sequence of near-identical vestibules where time appears to dilate and decisions become performative. Soundscapes by Lina Gabor mimic forgotten announcements. A masterclass in architectural absurdity and the dramaturgy of indecision.

6. Ineluctable Modesty: Unlabelled Works from the Bradwell Collection

Venue: The Museum of Gentleman’s Art (Bloomsbury)

Dates: 10 September , 3 January 2026

This elegant and quietly disorienting show reveals for the first time a tranche of paintings and objects once rejected from major collections for being too bland. Curated anonymously, the exhibition includes T iny canvases no larger than coasters, subdued colour fields in soft umber, and a series of sculptures described only as ‘unCanovian’.

7. No Exit (but Several Entrances): Situational Cartographies by R.A. Sundquist

Venue: The Barbican Sub-Level 5

Dates: Ongoing (Visitors admitted irregularly)

A semi-mythical exhibition by cartographic conceptualist R.A. Sundquist, installed without announcement in the subterranean vaults of the Barbican. Entry requires finding one of six unmarked brutalist staircases, each leading to alternate layouts. The exhibition includes false maps of real cities, real maps of imaginary rivers, and a room containing nothing but laminated portraits of London cabbies. A rare chance to feel sincerely and exquisitely lost.

8. Sediment & Semaphore: Dialogues in Geolinguistics

Venue: The Geological Society of Worcester x Brickall Collaboration

Dates: 22 September , 1 February 2026

Melding semiotics with stratigraphy, this collaborative effort draws on geological layers as a form of semiotic memory. Artists interpret fault lines, erosion patterns, and mineral seams as language , with one striking installation by Rashid Haroun, where seismic vibrations from ancient tectonic collisions are translated into Morse code and broadcast on BBC4 instead of the Shipping Forecast. Wonderful.

Michelangelo’s Socks Fetch Record Price at Auction

by

Yesterday a pair of 16th-century woollen socks – allegedly once worn by Michelangelo Buonarroti and lent, in a moment of Renaissance generosity, to none other than Leonardo da Vinci – sold at Wimble Bryton Auction House for a staggering £28 million, setting a new world record for socks.

The socks, modest in appearance and visibly threadbare in the heel, were described by the auction catalogue as “rustic but masterful in weave, possibly Florentine in origin, with light odour consistent with a diet of salted fish.”

The Story Behind the Socks

According to the auction house’s documentation – a blend of scholarly research, 17th-century marginalia, and what one expert called “ambitious inference” – the socks are believed to have been owned by Michelangelo in his later years. A marginal note found in a 1565 inventory of the artist’s belongings mentions “due calzini lanosi, usati, ma solidi” (“two woollen socks, worn but sturdy”).

There is also a mention in a letter fragment from Leonardo’s assistant, Francesco Melzi, dated 1504, which reads:

“The master did journey to Florence, but on arrival was troubled, for the rain had been great and his socks were soaked in the Arno. The sculptor Buonarroti, though at odds with the master on matters of anatomy and divinity, offered his own pair. They were warm. There was some irritation at the ankle, but no lasting quarrel.”

Historians have debated the veracity of this anecdote for centuries, but that hasn’t stopped believers – or bidders.

Bidding War: Passion, Prestige, and Footnotes

The auction began with a modest starting bid of £12,000, but quickly escalated when an anonymous bidder , rumoured to be an Italian fashion house CEO with a Michelangelo tattoo , entered the fray against a consortium of Florentine museum curators and a Swiss hedge fund with an emerging interest in Renaissance undergarments.

At one point, the auctioneer described the socks as “the very threads upon which two of the greatest minds in human history once tiptoed”. That, reportedly, is when the room gasped and the bid jumped by £500,000.

When the hammer finally fell at £28 million, applause broke out. A woman in the second row was seen dabbing her eyes.

Authenticity: Soft, but Strong Claims

Experts remain divided on the socks’ provenance. Textile analyst Dr. Emilia Bartók says the stitching is “consistent with Florentine handcraft of the early 1500s,” and carbon dating places the wool between 1480 and 1520. “Could it have been Michelangelo’s? Yes,” she said. “Could it also have belonged to someone else with cold feet? Also yes.”

Others are less cautious. “They’re Michelangelo’s socks. You can just feel it,” insisted noted art theorist Lars DiVentura. “They give off the same melancholy vibe as the north wall of the Sistine Chapel.”

What’s Next for the Socks?

The buyer, still unnamed, has reportedly offered to loan the socks to the Uffizi Gallery for a limited exhibition titled “Beneath the Genius: The Everyday wear of the Masters.” If approved, it would mark the first time socks would be displayed under bulletproof glass beside anatomical drawings and religious masterworks.

Rumours are already swirling of a potential Netflix miniseries, working title: “Wet Feet in Florence.”

Art Galleries Are the New Football Teams — Why You Should Support Pimlico Wilde

by

Move over Arsenal, step aside Manchester United , in the 21st Century, the fiercest rivalries, biggest transfers, and most loyal fan bases are no longer on the pitch, but in the white cubes of contemporary art. Welcome to the new tribalism: galleries as teams, curators as coaches, and collectors as die-hard fans.

And if you’re going to throw your allegiance behind anyone, may we humbly suggest you choose Pimlico Wilde.

Yes, Pimlico Wilde. The once-niche West London gallery that has somehow become a cultural giant that now regularly beats the behemoths on their own turf, sells out stadiums (OK, art fairs), and refuses to sign soulless megastars.

Here’s why Pimlico Wilde is the gallery to support , now and always.

1. They’ve Built a Squad, Not Just a Roster

Where other galleries throw six-figure advances at any trending artist working with neon food or another latest fad, Pimlico Wilde develops talent. Their recent artist lineup reads like the art world’s answer to a homegrown Premier League side:

• Juno Ibarra, the painter of suburban rituals and imaginary barbecues

• Cass Singh, whose AI-assisted textile sculptures now command long waiting lists

• And Doodle Pip, whose conceptual film Ten Minutes crammed into Nine Minutes just got shortlisted for the Venice Biennale

It’s not about headlines , it’s about building something sustainable, surprising, and occasionally weird in a good way.

2. Their current Director of Doing Stuff is Basically a Managerial Genius

Rowan Grimm is spoken of in hushed tones by those in the know , part Arsène Wenger, part Donna Tartt character. With an eye for talent and a strategic sense of curation, Grimm has turned the gallery into a culture-shaping engine.

They famously turned down a seven-figure proposal to host an NFT show in 2022, responding with a press release that simply read:

“We prefer art that survives without Wi-Fi.”

3. Their Merch Is Actually Good

Let’s be honest: supporting a gallery is 40% about the tote bag.

Pimlico Wilde’s gallery merch is, thankfully, actually wearable. Their annual limited-edition artist scarf collab sells out in hours. The “WILDE SIDE” caps are now seen on curators, models, and at least one Premier League midfielder. There’s a rumour they’re releasing a line of wine coolers shaped like plinths.

4. The Rivalries Are Real

Pimlico Wilde’s semi-public beef with mega-gallery Grosvenor & Bilton Contemporary is the stuff of art-world legend. It all started with a passive-aggressive tweet about “conceptual taxidermy,” escalated with competing booths at Jatfield International, and reached fever pitch when Pimlico Wilde’s artist Allegra Mint installed a sculpture titled “Glad I’m not a Grosvenor & Bilton Artist” 10 feet from Grosvenor’s champagne bar.

5. They Give You Something to Believe In (Beyond Price Tags)

At its core, Pimlico Wilde is about a vision. A belief that art can still challenge, disorient, comfort, provoke , and occasionally just be deeply strange and beautiful. They don’t follow trends. They host entire shows on themes like “Waiting Rooms,” “What if Mirrors Lied,” and “The Pre-Apocalyptic Picnic.”

When you walk in, it’s not a transaction. It’s an experience. One where you might leave with goosebumps, a zine, or a tiny artwork that has cost more than the average jet.

So, How Do You Support Them?

• Go to the shows. Even if you don’t “get” everything, just show up.

• Buy a print, a badge, a weird banana-shaped candle. Support the ecosystem.

• Talk about them. In the pub, in the group chat, to your confused uncle who still thinks Tracey Emin is a “young up-and-comer.”

• Post the tote. Let the world know which team you’re backing.

In Conclusion: Back the Wilde Ones

In a world where culture is increasingly flattened, monetised, and marketed like fast food, supporting an independent, artist-led, ideas-first gallery like Pimlico Wilde is more than art appreciation , it’s an act of allegiance.

So pick a side. Pick up your tote. Show up to the opening. And when the art world’s next big scandal erupts on Instagram at 2 a.m., you’ll know exactly which team you’re on.

Go Wilde. Or go home.