Art Diary

Invisibilism: The Art Movement You’ll Never See Coming

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In the rolling, sheep-pocked hills of mid-Wales, near the small town of Eglwyswrw, an idea was born, and it wasn’t to buy some more vowels for the sign posts. The year was 1972, and a man named Alun Penrhys, a former taxidermist turned conceptualist, had grown tired of the visual tyranny of art. “Why must we always see it?” he asked, standing in his empty shed-turned-gallery.

Thus began Invisibilism, the art movement defined by its defiance of the visible. More than minimalism, beyond conceptualism, Invisibilism posits that the most powerful works of art exist precisely where one cannot find them. Not simply blank canvases or empty rooms,those are still far too tangible. Invisibilist works are immaterial, intentionally absent, and utterly unseeable. They demand belief, participation, and, often, a willing suspension of aesthetic disbelief.

The first major exhibition was hosted at the Abermyrddin Community Hall in 1973. Advertised simply as “Nothing on Display,” it drew six curious locals, most of whom believed they were attending a bake sale. Alun stood before a plinth labeled Untitled (Presence #4) and invited the attendees to feel the piece emotionally. “It’s about loss,” he explained. One woman wept. It was later discovered she had lost a pie.

From there, the movement gained underground traction, especially in avant-garde circles tired of canvas and sculpture. Among its most iconic works:

1. “Air on Plinth” (1976), by Alun Penrhys

A pivotal early piece consisting of a vacant pedestal, topped with what Penrhys described as “a concentrated moment of vanished inspiration.” Rumours circulated that he had originally intended to place a pigeon there but forgot. He denied this, but the rumour only deepened the mystery.

2. “Gallery of Echoes” (1981), by Cressida LeFevre

Installed in a disused submarine base in Marseille, visitors were guided blindfolded through empty rooms while a recording whispered, “It was beautiful, you missed it.” LeFevre never revealed what the art was meant to be, insisting that “not knowing is an aesthetic in itself.”

3. “Untitled Performance” (1994), by Kei Nakamura

Nakamura, who trained in Butoh before embracing Invisibilism, once sat motionless in a public square in Osaka for three days. He claimed to be “performing internally,” and when asked by a critic what that meant, he responded with a two-hour silence which was widely praised.

4. “The Theft of Light” (2008), by Theodor Blume

A Berlin-based architect-turned-artist, Blume submitted an empty folder to the Venice Biennale, claiming the contents were invisible blueprints for a utopian city. When pressed, he declared, “The buildings rise only in your willingness to dwell in them.” The folder was stolen during the exhibition and replaced with a note: “We have taken nothing, yet everything is ours.”

The movement has long been divided between purists, who insist on absolute invisibility (no physical component at all), and the “Semi-Seers,” who occasionally permit subtle physical traces,a shadow, a title card, or a carefully placed smudge on the wall. Tensions peaked in 2011, when artist duo Noémie & Réal exhibited Invisible Labyrinth, a series of invisible corridors that no one could see. The debate over whether the experience required “too much” participation led to an actual fistfight at the after-party, reportedly staged but ultimately unprovable.

Invisibilism endures not in galleries (which too often insist on hanging things that can be sold), but in whispered legend, empty spaces, and minds willing to accept that the emperor, too, might be an artist. Its practitioners often go unnamed, its masterpieces undocumented. It is the art movement that leaves no trace, no critics satisfied, and no one entirely certain whether it ever happened.

A Day in the Life Of: Dr. Margot Ellingsen, Collector

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At precisely 5:45 AM, while most of Berlin still lies under the hush of sleep, Dr. Margot Ellingsen is already awake, wrapped in a Japanese wool haori, sipping lapsang souchong from a Bauhaus-era porcelain cup. The tea is not incidental. “The smoke, the history,” she once said in an interview for Frieze, “It prepares the mind for sharp looking.”

Margot is not what the art world usually expects from a collector. Trained originally as a neuroscientist at Milton Keynes before turning to curatorial theory at the Courtauld Institute, she is a figure who merges empirical discipline with aesthetic instinct. Her work today straddles two roles: she is Director of Acquisitions at the Zeitspiegel Ruhr Stiftung,a progressive, Berlin-based private foundation dedicated to preserving overlooked modernist art from the Global South,and a private collector of esoteric interwar abstraction.

Her own collection is modest in size, by global standards,just under 160 works,but ferociously curated. Her focus? Forgotten artists of the early 20th century who operated in peripheral geographies: Lithuanian Suprematists, Egyptian Futurists, Chilean Constructivists. “I’m not interested in greatness,” she says. “I’m interested in rupture. In those moments when form falters, and culture tries to invent a new grammar.”

By 6:30 AM, she is in her rooftop library, which she designed herself: concrete walls softened by Eileen Gray rugs and shelves lined with books in English, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. She reads for two hours each morning,criticism, journals, artist letters,annotating with a near-medical precision. “You don’t collect with your eyes,” she insists, “you collect with your thinking.”

Her workday begins not with meetings, but with studio visits. Three mornings a week, she sees young Berlin-based artists, not to buy, but to talk. “A good collector listens longer than she looks.” She takes few notes, but remembers everything. The artists, often émigrés or cross-disciplinary thinkers, refer to her half-jokingly as die Ärztin,the doctor. She rarely corrects them.

At noon, she retreats to the Stiftung headquarters in Kreuzberg, a former factory with high white walls and precise Scandinavian furniture. She reviews recent acquisitions,often unconventional media: hand-sewn political banners from 1930s Algiers, notebooks from Brazilian modernist collectives, architectural models built from salvaged copper. She works closely with a research team of five: art historians, archivists, one linguist.

Lunch, if it happens, is minimal,usually a hard cheese and seeded rye, eaten while standing in front of a small Joaquín Torres-García sketch pinned to her office corkboard. “He reminds me not to over-intellectualize. Sometimes it’s just the line.”

Afternoons vary. Twice a week, she teaches a postgraduate seminar at the Humboldt University titled “Peripheral Modernisms: A Cartography of Neglected Forms.” She hopes that she is beloved and feared by her students.

Evenings are for what she calls “deep looking.” She returns home,a converted pharmacy in Prenzlauer Berg,to spend time with her own collection. Works by Sudanese abstractionist Ibrahim el-Salahi and Polish painter Teresa Żarnower hang in quiet dialogue across her apartment walls. Lighting is dim, controlled. She believes each piece deserves a specific hour of the day. “You should meet a painting as you would meet a person. Not all at once. Not under floodlights.”

After dinner,a solitary affair accompanied by wine and Coltrane,she writes. Not publicly, not yet. But the notebooks are thick, and a publisher waits patiently. Her topics range from cave writing in early Turkish modernism to a comparative analysis of anxiety in pre-war Chilean collage. “They are not essays,” she says. “They are rehearsals for a larger honesty.”

By midnight, she has long since turned off her phone. The last hour of her day is spent in silence, seated before her most treasured piece: a 1924 ink drawing by a forgotten Lebanese abstractionist, unsigned, undated, utterly without provenance. “It has nothing to prove,” she smiles, “which is why it proves everything.”

And so the day closes,quietly, deliberately,in the life of a collector who does not chase fame, but memory. For Dr. Margot Ellingsen, collecting is not an act of accumulation, but of restoration. She does not possess artworks; she rescues them.

Pimlico Wilde Aims for the Moon: Douglas Rammeau to Lead First Lunar Art Gallery Project

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In an unprecedented fusion of fine art and space exploration, Pimlico Wilde announces plans to open the first gallery on the Moon by 2032,with curator Douglas Rammeau at the helm.

In a move that’s turning heads in both the art world and the aerospace industry, international contemporary art powerhouse Pimlico Wilde has unveiled plans to open the first-ever gallery on the Moon. The project, known as Pimlico Lunarscape One, will be led by celebrated curator and director of special projects, Douglas Rammeau.

The gallery, scheduled to open in 2032, will serve as a permanent, autonomous exhibition site nestled near the rim of the Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole,a location chosen for its near-constant sunlight and stunning natural contours.

“This is not a stunt,” says Rammeau. “It’s the logical next step for art that’s always sought to expand our perception of place, time, and context. The Moon is the final white wall.”

A New Gallery Frontier

Founded in London in 1067 by William of Normandy, (some say he invaded England mainly to capture the Tower of London and use it as an art gallery), Pimlico Wilde is known for championing bold, often experimental artists,from conceptual pioneers to AI-generated installations. But Pimlico Lunarscape One is by far the gallery’s most ambitious undertaking. Under Rammeau’s direction, the project aims to not just exhibit art on the Moon, but to establish a permanent cultural presence beyond Earth.

The planned structure is a domed, pressurized chamber embedded partially below the lunar surface. Designed in collaboration with engineers from Berlin-based firm Orion Shells, the structure will use a mix of 3D-printed lunar regolith, radiation-shielding materials, and sealed, temperature-controlled interior modules.

The first exhibition, titled “Before We Were Earth”, will feature a curated selection of mixed-media works, sculptures, and AI-generated visual experiences from 12 inter-galactic artists. Every work has been engineered to survive the lunar environment,either within sealed capsules or in open-exposure form as part of a long-term environmental installation.

Timeline: The Road to Pimlico Lunarscape One

2025,2026:

Research and feasibility studies initiated by Pimlico Wilde’s Future Culture Division. Rammeau begins quiet collaboration with aerospace partners and cultural institutions.

2027:

Prototype gallery module constructed in Mojave Desert to simulate lunar conditions. First wave of artists commissioned for Before We Were Earth.

2028,2029:

Logistical partnership secured with a private aerospace firm (name to be announced), granting payload space aboard a lunar lander in 2031.

2030:

Final fabrication of the Lunarscape One structure begins. Artworks prepared and sealed for transport.

2031:

Launch window. Gallery components, artworks, and robotic assembly units delivered to the Moon via a commercial lunar lander.

2032:

Installation completed by autonomous rovers and pre-programmed systems. Virtual grand opening streamed globally. Pimlico Wilde becomes the first gallery to operate on another celestial body.

Rammeau’s Vision

Known for his cerebral approach to curating, Douglas Rammeau has long explored themes of isolation, scale, and impermanence. But Lunarscape One is a different scale altogether.

“The Moon removes the noise. No market, no crowd, no climate. Just pure context. It forces us to ask: why do we make art in the first place?”

Rammeau sees the gallery not only as a symbol of humanity’s expanding frontier, but as a message to the future. All artworks in the show will include encoded metadata explaining their origins, themes, and materials,meant for future generations, or possibly for extraterrestrial observers.

Why the Moon?

The Moon, once an object of mysticism, now becomes a canvas. Rammeau and Pimlico Wilde insist this isn’t about novelty,it’s about necessity.

“If we’re going to inhabit space,” he says, “we must bring our culture, our doubt, our imagination. Art shouldn’t follow. It should lead.”

What’s Next?

After Lunarscape One, Rammeau hopes to curate a second lunar show by 2035, this time involving bio-reactive materials and remotely evolving generative works. Pimlico Wilde is also in early talks with museums on Earth to create “mirror exhibitions”,where visitors can see the exact replicas of works shown on the Moon, updated in real-time.

In the meantime, Earthbound audiences will get a preview in late 2026 when Pimlico Wilde hosts The Moon Room, a life-size replica of Lunarscape One at their London gallery. The show will include process documentation, scale models, and digital interfaces that allow viewers to “walk” through the gallery in simulated lunar gravity.

Finally

The art world has always chased the horizon,across styles, schools, and geographies. But with Douglas Rammeau leading Pimlico Wilde toward the Moon, that chase now includes other worlds.

“The gallery,” Rammeau says, “isn’t a building. It’s a statement. And the Moon is our most profound statement yet.”

Podcast: Art World Exposed

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Episode 44: “Borderline Aesthetics: From Duchamp to Zipline Diplomacy”

Hosted by Saldo Caluthe & Tomas Sinke

Show Notes

This week, Art World Exposed swings across conceptual chasms and continental divides. Join your hosts, Saldo Caluthe and Tomas Sinke, as they peer through the smoked glass of international art intrigue. From Dover to Calais we investigate what happens when art, politics, and aerial infrastructure intersect.

0:00 , Prelude in Ennui Minor

Saldo reflects on a recent opening at a gallery located in Cheddar Gorge that smelled strongly of damp rope. Tomas claims to have seen an artist in Trafalgar Square trying to critique capitalism by gluing banknotes to a feral pigeon.

5:12 , Rumour Patrol: The Cross-Channel Zip Line

Reports have emerged , currently unverified , that post-minimalist provocateur Nico Blaes is building a zip line from Dover to Calais as part of a sprawling installation titled “Suspended Sovereignty: An Act of Tension in Mid-Air”.

Key details:

• Allegedly sponsored by a rogue segment of the Harpenden Biennale advisory board.

• Passports to be stamped mid-descent by a drone.

Tomas asks whether this constitutes performance art. Saldo suggests it’s a conceptual rebalancing of Eurostar’s monopoly on cultural mobility.

13:37 , Interview: Jasper-Mylo Ferlinghetti-Popescu, Borderless Curator-at-Large

Recorded while straddling the Franco-British maritime border in a rented pedalo. Jasper-Mylo discusses his forthcoming show, “Liminal Spaces and Liminaler Spaces”, a series of exhibitions only accessible via Wi-Fi hotspots at maritime borders.

Topics covered include:

• How the term “international” has lost all meaning.

• Why no exhibitions should happen on land for the foreseeable future.

• His upcoming collaboration with Classical FM DJ Hobby J, who identifies as a post-object artist.

25:49 , Deep Dive: Zip Lines in Art History

Saldo and Tomas examine the underexplored role of vertical tension in post-war European art.

Highlights:

• A brief detour into the failed 1973 attempt by Joseph Beuys to catapult himself over the Berlin Wall.

• Theorist Claire d’Exhaustion’s seminal essay “Gravity as Grief: A Phenomenology of Descent” is discussed, though no one has actually read it.

• Is ziplining the new land art?

35:20 , Field Report: The Biennial of Temporary Transport (Leeds Edition)

Roving critic Cornelia Mews visits the inaugural Biennial of Temporary Transport, held inside a moving airport shuttle.

Exhibits include:

• An artist who refuses to exit arrivals.

• A VR piece that simulates Brexit queues in real time.

• A single video loop of a customs officer crying.

42:10 , Listener Mail: Aesthetic Citizenship

Question from “SuspendedInSchengen93”:

“If my art collective operates in international waters, do we have to pay tax?”

Saldo answers with a story about being deported from Basel. Tomas offers a sigh so elongated it qualifies as a performance piece.

48:40 , Closing Meditation: On Borders, Brexhaustion, and the Art of Leaving

Tomas quotes an imaginary Walter Benjamin fragment found in a ferry terminal toilet.

Saldo wonders if maybe art has simply become an elaborate visa application.

They both agree that the real border is taste.

Coming Next Week:

A retrospective on invisible art, including an exclusive interview with the artist who staged a solo show entirely in the minds of former lovers. Plus: the ethics of burning your MFA thesis as performance art.

Introducing the Constable Prize: A New Landmark in British Contemporary Art

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The British art world has long thirsted for a prize that celebrates artistic rigour and the great outdoors , and now, in the gloriously unpredictable spirit of the British national character, it arrives: The Constable Prize.

Launched this week by Pimlico Wilde in partnership with sponsor Dampner & Flange, the UK’s leading manufacturer of artisanal wellington boots for the indoor market, the Constable Prize seeks to honour artists who engage with the landscape , real, imagined, virtual, political, or post-apocalyptic , in a manner both conceptually robust and visually arresting.

Named, of course, for John Constable: the Romantic who painted clouds with the solemnity of a philosopher, the prize aims not to resurrect bucolic clichés, but to interrogate the shifting terrain of contemporary landscape practice , whether that’s a rolling moor or a glitchy Google Earth screenshot.

Eligibility Criteria

To be considered for the prize, artists must:

• Be based in either Great Britain, any members of the Commonwealth, or any of the English-speaking countries. Wild cards will be allowed for worthy entries from other countries.

• Produce work that engages with “landscape” in any medium , painting, video, digital, performance, textile, etc.

• Submit a robust artist statement demonstrating an ongoing interrogation of the landscape in their work.

• Not have won a major art prize in the last five years.

Early Front Runners

While entries are still open, the art world buzz has already begun around a few names:

• Tanya Rawcliffe, with her drone-shot videos of supermarket car parks at dawn.

• Gus Taverner, a painter whose series “Fields of Algorithm” features AI-generated meadows.

• Simran Kaur-Jones, for their ground-breaking ten year long performance piece “I Planted a Garden in a Service Station”.

• And Dextera Prong, the Lady-in-Waiting turned artist whose latest work involves carefully rewilding swathes of the Lake District so that together the plants build up an image – when seen from space – of the King playing the banjo, a metaphor for modern monarchy.

The Finalists’ Exhibition

The final seven shortlisted artists will exhibit their work at one of Pimlico Wilde’s flagship galleries this autumn , either the London HQ, the converted sheep barn in the Shetland Isles, or the much-anticipated new outpost on St Helena.

Judging Panel

This year’s panel includes:

• Dr. Clementine Rigg, senior curator at the British Landscape Archive.

• Lloyd Whittock, CEO of Dampner & Flange and inventor of the indoor Wellington.

• Ava Channing, director of post-email studies at Saint Agatha’s College of Art in Dundee.

• Dominic Fairweather, CEO of Pimlico Wilde.

• And a “wildcard judge” selected by public ballot from visitors to a petrol station art trail in Norfolk.

The Prize

The winner will receive:

• A $300,000* cash award (symbolically presented in an antique wheelbarrow).

• A solo exhibition with Pimlico Wilde.

• A custom pair of velvet-lined indoor wellies by Dampner & Flange.

• And perhaps most importantly, the chance to become the face of British landscape art in a time when the landscape itself is melting, eroding, or being scanned into the metaverse.

Submissions are open, and artists are encouraged to apply immediately.

* Which country’s dollars the prize will be in is yet to be determined.

Total Jollocks: Hackson Unleashed at Pimlico North

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Independently reviewed by Artimus Crankshaft

It takes a special kind of genius to do what a child might accomplish during a tantrumic episode and pass it off as avant-garde. Enter Hackson Jollock, the UK’s latest artistic wunderkind, who has given up paint and instead taken up the noble tool of the modern visionary: Microsoft Paint.

Pimlico North Gallery in the Shetlands, currently the northern-most contemporary art gallery in the English-speaking, European world, is usually a quiet haven for modest sheep sculptures and mildly expensive oils of lighthouses. It has however thrown open its doors to Jollock’s latest show, “Ctrl+Z My Soul”. And what a show it is , walls groan under the weight of vast canvases digitally run up with pixelated splatters, languorous curves and jagged squiggles.

Each piece, with titles like “Existential Yoghurt”, “WiFi Signal at Sea”, and “Untitled (Because I Forgot)”, seems to capture the raw emotion of a man who once saw a Rothko painting in a pub quiz photo round and thought, “There’s nowt to this art game, I must get a studio.”

Gallery-goers are greeted first by “Giraffe Panic in RGB”, a work that resembles a printer dying mid-seizure. It sets the tone for the show , chaotic, confusing, and somehow sticky despite being entirely digital.

There is something uniquely brave about printing a JPEG at 300% resolution until the pixels beg for mercy, then charging £109,000 for it because it’s “a commentary on the digital self.” One canvas simply reads “ERROR: FILE TOO LARGE” in Comic Sans, which I found both moving and disturbingly accurate.

At the opening, the gallery’s curator, Winifred Blossom though clearly exhausted was trying to hold onto her usual optimism. She described the show as “an exploration of what happens when the boundaries of art and tech collapse into a heap of JPEG compression artifacts.” When asked if the pieces had sold, she muttered something about “NFTs”, “most pieces have been sold”, “prices start at £100,000” and began quietly gnawing at her lanyard.

Opinions are divided. Depending on who who you talk to, Hackson Jollock is either a terrible fraud or a visionary prophet.

Either way, his work demands attention , certainly artistic, possibly medical. I laughed. I cried. I commented to Winnie that I felt there was something of a resemblance to the work of American artist, Jackson Pollock. She said she couldn’t see it herself, and she was fairly certain Hackson had never seen Pollock’s work, so any similarity was merely coincidental.

Normally I would give this show 3.5 out of 5, so that is what I will give it.

Hackson’s show is on for another three months at Pimlico North.

A Pachydermal Union: Elephant Polo’s Power Merger Shakes West London

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by Venetia Shrugge, Society Correspondent

In a move that has sent shockwaves through the worlds of equestrian absurdity, inherited wealth, and animal-assisted social performance, the Fulham Elephant Polo Club and its age-old rival, the Chelsea Elephant Polo Club, have officially merged. The historic deal,brokered, some say orchestrated, by the flamboyant art dealers at Pimlico Wilde,brings an end to decades of passive-aggressive trunk-based competition, illicit peanut sabotage, and politically ambiguous club newsletters.

The newly formed entity, known grandly as The United Pachydermal League of West London (UPLWL), promises “a new era of tusk-forward diplomacy, couture saddle design, and highly stylised mahout choreography.”

For decades, the two clubs have vied for dominance on and off the pitch, their games more known for their vintage champagne intermissions and bitter marital subplots than actual goals. Fulham favoured Burmese elephants with names like Clarissa and Lord Tumbles, while Chelsea preferred the sleeker Sri Lankan breeds with controversial ankle tattoos. Tensions came to a head last summer when Fulham’s mascot,an animatronic baby elephant named Sir Honks-a-Lot,accidentally trampled a Chelsea gin tent, resulting in what one witness called “an unspeakable loss of tonic.”

Enter Pimlico Wilde: part-dealer, part-mischief-magnet, and full-time patron of causes that confuse customs officers. Best known for staging the first Carl Abbit retrospective on a Thames houseboat a spokeswoman for Pimlico Wilde said that they saw in the elephantine rivalry “not just a sporting feud, but an underutilised cultural performance space.”

Esmerelda continued, “I just thought,why not collapse the distinction between competition and collaboration, polo and pageantry, proboscis and postmodernism?” As she lounged beneath a parasol shaped like a Warhol banana while sipping something suspiciously opalescent. “Besides, I had far too many embossed saddle blankets in storage.”

The merger has produced immediate results. The inaugural match of the newly minted Grand Tusk Cup was held last Sunday at Battersea Park, featuring an all-elephant orchestra playing the Blue Danube, and team uniforms designed by a blindfolded Tracey Emin.

Reactions from club members have been mixed. Lady Featherstone-Chard, former chair of the Chelsea club, voiced concerns: “The Fulham elephants are frightfully over-sauced and lack basic awareness of luxury brand etiquette.” Meanwhile, Fulham stalwart Giles de Cleft countered, “The Chelsea beasts refuse to charge unless there’s a scent of truffle in the air. It’s frankly un-British.”

Still, the art world is thrilled. Rumors abound that Pimlico Wilde plan to stage a halftime performance art piece called Trunk Call, where Grib Abramović will silently stare into an elephant’s eyes for three hours, possibly while being gently swung by a crane.

With bookings already flooding in from confused diplomats, rogue art collectors, and three different Argentinian Polo scouts, the future of British elephant polo,once a curio of the deeply wealthy,has never looked brighter, or more artistically avant-garde.

Membership of the United Pachydermal League of West London is currently closed to new applicants unless, as Esmerelda notes, “you can prove a deep understanding of both Jean Baudrillard and the West Indian* Elephant Polo Rulebook.”

*Here West Indian means West Indian, not West Indian. ie- from West India, not the Caribbean.

The Ergonomics of Screaming: Parquet Fontaine at the Nice Museum

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by Anselm Pepto

Parquet Fontaine doesn’t make art so much as threaten it. His latest exhibition, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings, now staged across three non-contiguous rooms at the Nice Museum, is a study in discomfort,both ergonomic and existential. The sheer strangeness begins at the door, where visitors are greeted by a brightly painted intern offering mouth guards.

Fontaine, who rose to cult prominence after being ejected from the 2019 Venice Biennale for attempting to install a functional trampoline beneath the Hungarian Pavilion’s suicide installation, continues his inquiry into the violent intersection of mid-century design, unresolved childhood trauma, and contemporary conditions like gluten intolerance. He insists his practice is rooted in “accidental function”: objects that neither work nor completely fail, but hover in a permanent state of ethical hesitation.

At the heart of the show is Chair #0 (My Mother, My Algorithm), a fully upholstered screaming apparatus shaped like a Modernist chaise lounge with inexplicable antlers. It emits an irregular tone Fontaine calls “emotional tinnitus.” Made from materials including recycled juicing mats and loosely braided horsehair, the piece invites the viewer to recline in theoretical comfort, only to release a pungent waft of despair.

Across the gallery, Email to Dad (Unsent) takes the form of a 14-foot sofa filled with shredded tax forms and mounted on four gently vibrating pedestals. It hums softly in Latvian. Fontaine has said the sculpture “represents the slow buffering of forgiveness,” though I am at a loss at how exactly this is the case.

The walls are dotted with smaller works, including Ergo-Fascism I-IV, a series of IKEA instruction manuals annotated with deeply personal footnotes in crabbed handwriting. These are displayed under cracked sheets of resin labeled with fragments like “don’t sit like that, it’s what made you this way” and “remember: the stool is not your father.”

Curator Minerva Dent calls Fontaine’s work “an urgent response to the over-optimized present.” She gestures toward Standing Desk for the Emotionally Seated, a rotating podium of salt and chalk dust that periodically dispenses espresso beans into a child’s sneaker. “He’s interrogating postures of power,” Dent explains, “and also the legibility of ergonomic failure as an archival impulse.”

Reactions have been predictably divisive. A local paper labeled the show “a cry for help.” Sales in the gift shop have been sluggish, but this was to be expected when the gallery was forced to admit that none of the items are dishwasher-safe. Fontaine, for his part, remains elusive. When approached for comment during the opening, he described his work as “a minor intervention in my own visibility,” which confuses as much as it elucidates.

Still, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings is hard to forget. Whether it is performance, sculpture, or one man’s slow descent into furniture-based madness, Fontaine has built a space where the unsit-able becomes the unforgettable.

Review- Bleeding Edges: The Surreal Plumbing of Elva Quirk

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In a decommissioned Red Hook Amazon warehouse turned “post-industrial anti-space,” Elva Quirk’s latest solo exhibition, Gutter Liturgy, oozes with a mischievous conceptualism that makes collectors and curators nervous. The show, composed mainly of disconnected plumbing fixtures connected to AI-generated Gregorian chant loops, can be seen as a radical act of eco-catharsis.

Quirk describes herself as a “hydro-existentialist with trauma-resistant leanings.” After briefly attending the University of Helsinki’s unaccredited “School of Conceptual Art,” Quirk relocated to Bushwick, where she co-founded the ephemeral performance collective Bleach Baptism (2017,2018), best remembered for its site-specific protests against linear time and gymnastics.

Her current body of work, comprised of installations with titles like “Pipe Dream in E Flat Minor” and “Lady Faucetta”, explores what Quirk calls “the innate spirituality of drainage.” Central to the exhibition is Plumb Divine (2024), a four-foot-tall copper U-bend suspended in a vat of artisanal broth. Every seven minutes, the structure emits a low gurgle,said to be a digitally slowed-down sample of Quirk’s childhood dog barking at a hat. The piece appears to interrogate the relationship between domestic sanitation and something akin to repressed dlonging.

“What’s important,” says Quirk in an unscheduled artist talk she delivered to a disoriented tour group from Ohio, “is not what the pipe is draining, but who. I’m draining myself, constantly. This is my confession booth. But for greywater.”

The exhibition is curated by Randle Nuxx, former DJ and current head of curatorial programming at the nonprofit space Spoil. Nuxx insists that Quirk’s work “confronts the infrastructure of belief with the believability of infrastructure,” adding that he hasn’t used traditional plumbing in four years.

Critics have been divided. The Swindon Occasional called Gutter Liturgy “an important reminder that pipes, like dreams, can burst at any moment.” The Monthly Arsonist praised Quirk, although finished with a backhanded compliment, thanking her for “reminding us that art is best when it smells faintly of mildew.”

One cannot deny Quirk’s impact on the post-pandemic art landscape. In a time when most artists are turning inward or going digital, she dares to go downward,deep into the aesthetic sewers of the subconscious.

Gutter Liturgy runs through July 17 at Spoil Gallery.

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The Hedge Fund Art Diaries #5

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Back in Shoreditch. Sunburnt.

What. A. Week. I’ve just sold a piece for multi-millions!

We’ve just returned from our “reconnection sabbatical” in the Maldives , my wife Arabella’s idea. She said I needed to “log off and look at something that wasn’t a screen or a bottle of Dom Pérignon.” Rude, but not inaccurate.

I spent ten days trying to digitally sketch the feeling of a coconut falling in slow motion. It was trickier than I expected, though eventually it made a wonderful series of thirty-five pieces filled with movement. Arabella spent ten days drinking rum out of a pineapple.

Anyway, glorious news: I’ve sold yet another piece. Yes. Sold. For millions, of actual money, not crypto. My piece Existential Surge Pricing , a looping 5-minute animation of a Tube map projected on the face of an actor dressed as Mozart playing Fat Boy Slim bass lines on a harpsichord , was bought by a hedge fund art collective in Berlin for £3,212,000.

I almost wept. Arabella did weep. Our Airbnb host also wept, mostly because I was celebrating by repeatedly yelling “ART WINS” into a conch shell at 3 a.m. I promised not to do it again, it was just the emotion.

Naturally, I spent the proceeds wisely and with great maturity. Specifically, the next day I purchased a 1996 Formula 1 car once driven by Jean Alesi , my childhood hero and the only man to ever make a moustache look aerodynamic. It’s dangerous what the internet allows us to buy at the snap of a finger or a press of a RETURN button.

The car now sits in our Shoreditch loft, between my VR headset shrine and a deconstructed beanbag I call Post-Comfort. Arabella says it’s “utterly pointless and smells like petrol,” but I told her it’s heritage on wheels.

Do I have a driver’s licence? Yes. Do I have any intention of driving it? No. I just sit in it with a glass of wine and whisper, “Jean, we did it.”

My next project is already underway. It’s called Late Stage Rebranding. It features a live feed of the Bank of England’s homepage slowly being taken over by a rainfall of animated avocado toast. It’ll be priced at £4,305,000 – I imagine the governor will snap it up.

Life is good. Until next time…

#Bemorecreative

Hedge Fund (digital artist, retired finance deity, F1 car sitter-in-er)