Art history

Slow Collapse in Five Acts: The Enigmatic World of Théo Marat

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There are artists who make things. Then there is Théo Marat, who lets things unmake themselves.

A former structural engineer turned post-object conceptualist, Marat is best known for orchestrating what he calls “durational decompositions”: large-scale sculptural installations made entirely from biodegradable, tensioned, or self-eroding materials, designed not to last, but to fail.

His 2022 breakout work, Torsion Sonata (for Quiet Buildings), consisted of five identical towers constructed from compressed salt blocks, beeswax, and linen,each nearly 40 meters tall and internally stressed by heat-reactive nickel wires. Installed in a disused greenhouse in Pau, the towers were never “exhibited” in the conventional sense. There was no opening, no audience. Only a series of thermal triggers and a network of high-frequency microphones captured the event as the towers gradually collapsed,sighing, splintering, slumping,over the course of ninety days. The footage was later condensed into a five-channel audio feed lasting five days, titled The Things That Fold Themselves In. It is the only documentation that survives.

Even calling Marat’s work “sculpture” seems misguided. His practice lives somewhere between choreography, architecture, materials science, and speculative poetics. Trained at AUJ Zurich before abandoning his doctoral research into concrete fatigue cycles in modern sculpture, Marat turned to unmaking not out of disillusionment, but dissatisfaction with engineering’s obsession with stability. “We spend so much time trying to keep things standing,” he once wrote, “but entropy is the most honest collaborator.”

In 2024’s Lacuna Engine (Prototype #7), exhibited in a refrigerated room in Rotterdam, Marat installed a grid of sugar-glass sheets suspended vertically by tensioned Kevlar cables, each positioned under carefully calibrated drips of warm water. As the droplets accumulated, stress fractures emerged. First barely visible, then suddenly structural. Visitors reported moments of near silence interrupted by crystalline chimes as panels gave way one by one, in unpredictable sequence,like a musical composition written by time.

Critics have called his work “beautifully useless” (The Swindon Post), “a kind of ritualized decay” (Contemporary Art in Harare), and even “engineering theatre.” But to dismiss Marat’s installations as gimmicks of entropy is to miss the quiet rigor of their construction. Every variable,humidity, thermal expansion coefficient, melt rate, material memory,is calculated, then deliberately baked in to the sculpture. The collapse is in no way accidental.

But perhaps Marat’s strangest, and most haunting, work to date was 2025’s Body of Agreement (Undone), a collaboration with three contract lawyers, a Japanese tailor and a textile conservator. The work was composed of a 240-page legal agreement printed in edible ink on rice paper, bound in lambskin vellum, and hand-stitched into the lining of a high-end men’s suit. The suit was worn,without explanation,by a professional actor during a six-week residency at a commercial law firm in Brussels. At the end of the residency, the actor was doused in rainwater and left standing in a public plaza, where passersby watched the ink run and the suit collapse into pulp and thread.

What is one to make of an artist like Marat? Is there a market for what he makes, when there is no physical object to acquire and often, not even a clear thesis? Yes, collectors flock to his work, which reminds them, and us, that in an art world that too often chases permanence, spectacle, or legibility, that all structures,legal, architectural, social, personal,are ultimately temporary.

Wings of Meaning: The Aeroplanic Interventions of Marja Klein

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In a remote hangar on the outskirts of Toulouse, a Lufthansa Airbus A320 glows iridescent under the lights. Not from its metallic fuselage, but from a dizzying cascade of brushstrokes on its body. This is not a corporate stunt or a conceptual prank,it’s the latest work of Marja Klein, the reclusive Dutch-German painter who has become the most controversial figure in contemporary art by doing what no painter before her has done: use aircraft,actual, operational aircraft,as her canvas. For Klein, the plane is not a vehicle but a surface.

Her practice began unassumingly enough: graduate work in neo-expressionist abstraction at the Städelschule, a few residencies in Iceland and Patagonia, and a brief stint observing some aeronautical engineers. But it was her 2019 manifesto, “The Extended Canvas: Toward a Transatmospheric Aesthetics,” that revealed her ambition. In it, she argued that traditional painting had reached a saturation point, both spatially and semantically. “If canvas is a skin,” she wrote, “why not paint the organs of global movement? Why not paint the very arteries through which tourism and commerce flow?”

The first iteration of this idea,Fuselage No. 1 (For Barnett Newman),landed, quite literally, at Charles de Gaulle in early 2021. A retired cargo jet, reactivated temporarily for the work, bore a single red zip line down its side, splitting a field of hand-painted electric blue. It drew criticism from both art world purists and aviation traditionalists. “It’s neither safe nor comprehensible,” said one Parisian curator/pilot, who didn’t want to be named. “It’s somewhere between performance and vandalism.”

Undeterred, Klein’s work escalated. In collaboration with several independent air fleets and a little-known Estonian aerospace coating company, she began producing what she calls aero-paintings: labour-intensive, site-specific works executed directly onto the planes, which are then returned to flight. Each one requires months of bureaucratic negotiation, FAA consultations, and custom pigment development to withstand the UV exposure and atmospheric pressure changes. And yet, to Klein, all this is part of the piece.

These aircraft,glimpsed only briefly by passengers on the tarmac or through terminal windows,become ephemeral galleries of motion. “I’m not interested in permanence,” she said in a rare interview. “I’m interested in distribution. In becoming part of someone’s memory of a journey.”

Her 2024 project “Flightpath Diptych” involved two Boeing 737s: one painted in a palette of pale greens and muted greys based on 1950s Soviet military maps; the other inscribed with layers of coded writing drawn from declassified Cold War-era weather reports. The planes crossed paths over the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, their coordinated flight paths generating a skyborne choreography visible only to satellite tracking systems and a small group of Klein’s paid subscribers who were given access to the live telemetry data.

Art historians struggle to categorize her work. Is it painting, performance, installation? Environmental art? Some invoke Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; others trace her lineage to Gutai, to Yves Klein, to Panamarenko or Hipplo. But Klein herself resists the comparisons.

In so doing, she has raised thorny questions about authorship, temporality, and visibility. Philistine aviation crews mean that her planes are often cleaned or repainted without notice. A work might last six months or six days. Sometimes, she leaves only a signature in a hard-to-spot area- these stay airborne longer according to plane spotters/collectors around the world who have welcomed her work, tracking her oeuvre with vigilance, flight logs, and their familiarity with global aviation routes.

Yet for those who catch a glimpse,on a runway in Jakarta, during taxiing in São Paulo, or parked beside a generic corporate fleet in Oslo,Klein’s work lands like a glitch in the visual field. A disruption of the technocratic gloss of modern air travel. A reminder that the sky, too, can be colonized by art.

Since this piece was written we have heard that the B&A is reportedly in talks with Klein to acquire her entire series of aircraft skins in digital replica form.

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

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

By Archibald Haversham

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

The Council of Alfred (c. 878)

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

The Coronation of Richard II (1377)

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

The Tudors and a Timely Portrait

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

A Georgian Gamble (1783)

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

The Queen’s Secret Commission (1954)

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

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

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

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

A Smile Reframed: Was the Mona Lisa Actually Mrs. Yelland of Surrey, England?

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In a tantalising discovery, a recently unearthed cache of correspondence housed in a disintegrating trunk at an estate auction in Dorset has ignited fresh controversy over the true identity of the sitter in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. According to the letters, written in a brisk, looping English hand and signed by one “Letitia Yelland,” the subject of the world’s most enigmatic painting may not have been Lisa Gherardini of Florence after all,but a genteel visitor from England. This was Mrs. Yelland, the wife of none other than Edwin Carpe Yelland, a minor but evidently proud inventor from Kentish Town, who, is believed to have pioneered the first self-cleaning paintbrush, made from cat fur soaked in his patented cleanser.

Historians are predictably cautious. But in the ever-spiraling vortex of art attribution and speculative reattribution, especially in the post-Walter Benjamin, hyper-authenticity economy of image discourse, perhaps we should not be surprised. If we can accept Duchamp’s mustached Gioconda, why not a paintbrush-wielding Englishwoman as the original muse?

The documents, now being pored over by a rotating cast of paleographers, art historians, and one enthusiastic TikToker who won a competition to help out and make three Shorts per day, describe a six-month sojourn in Florence circa 1502. In one letter to her sister-in-law back in Surrey, Letitia writes:

“The Florentine sun is not kind to Edwin’s complexion, and yet he insists upon demonstrating his ‘fine bristles’ to any painter within reach. A peculiar man with intense eyes,Leonardo, I believe,asked if I might sit for him, as he ‘fancied a face that withheld more than it gave.’ I agreed, mostly out of boredom.”

The painting in question, of course, was not completed until 1517, according to traditional art historical timelines. But the Yelland hypothesis introduces a new framework of possibility, one in which the sitter’s identity is not confined to the courtly conventions of Florentine society but instead reimagined through a cross-cultural, proto-globalist lens.

Letitia Yelland would represent a curious hybrid of muse and modernity. Her husband’s invention,dismissed in his day, the letters claim, as “too clean” for proper oil work,might now be seen as emblematic of the painterly shift from medieval materials to Renaissance experimentation. It is tempting to speculate that Leonardo, fascinated as ever by technology and anatomy, might have found the brush and the British equally compelling.

Critics, of course, are already sharpening their knives. Giorgio Ferretti, curator at the Lago di Como Institute of Old Art, calls the claim “an amusing anachronism, best left to historical fiction.” Others, including several members of the London-based Institute for the Study of Noncanonical Portraiture, are more receptive.

Indeed, reimagining the Mona Lisa as Letitia Yelland,tourist, accidental muse, wife of an inventor,unmoors the painting from its static pedestal. It becomes instead a site of narrative reinvention, a symbol not only of Renaissance mystique but of the long shadow of British leisure travel and the inventive ego. The smile becomes not maternal or mysterious, but vaguely amused: the expression of a woman politely enduring a portrait session she neither asked for nor fully understood.

Whether Mrs. Yelland ever crossed Leonardo’s path is unlikely to be definitively proven. But the possibility, absurd and delightful, opens up new conceptual space around one of art’s most scrutinized images. After all, in the age of deepfakes, AI-generated Rembrandts, and metadata-driven connoisseurship, what could be more modern than questioning everything we thought we knew,especially about a smile?

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Edwin Yelland as the inventor of “the paintbrush.” He may, in fact, have only improved upon it. The distinction, like the sitter’s identity, remains delightfully unresolved.

Was Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea Ahead of His Time?

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The recent surfacing of a cache of panel paintings attributed to the long-rumoured Essexian painter Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea has caused a quiet ripple in the scholarly world,a ripple that threatens to redraw the northern edge of Renaissance art history. The discovery, made in the damp crypt of St. Osyth’s Church in South Essex, includes eight oil-on-oak portraits, a triptych of St. Edmund in exile, and a peculiar, allegorical panel titled The Melancholy of Tides,each bearing the monogram P.D.F.o.S. and, more tellingly, a startling sensibility that neither quite belongs to the quattrocento nor to the Elizabethan court into which Piero is said to have drifted.

The rumour that Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea (ca. 1535,1602) was a contemporary, and possibly friend, of William Shakespeare is now supported by archival notations found in the 1598 guest ledger of The Mermaid Tavern, where a “Master Pietro the painter, from the Essexish coast, with melancholy wit and Milanese hat” is recorded alongside entries for Kit Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the “Gent. from Stratford.” Until recently considered apocryphal,a curious footnote in a sea of Tudor ephemera,Piero’s life and work are now emerging with a fog-laced clarity that seems fitting for a painter from the salt-bitten marshes of Southend.

Unusually, the central question animating this rediscovery is not was he real? (the evidence increasingly says yes), nor even was he good? (the panels suggest he was),but rather: was he ahead of his time?

At first glance, Piero’s work resists easy periodization. His compositions bear the deep, translucent glazing of a Bellini, yet his figures are oddly distended, stylized, and lit with an iridescence closer to later Mannerist painters like Bronzino. The Melancholy of Tides in particular,a central nude figure half-submerged in a tidal pool, cradling a lobster painted in unnerving detail,seems entirely unmoored from the prevailing iconography of the late 16th century. To modern critics it reads like an allegory of environmental grief, avant la lettre, and anticipates Romantic preoccupations with the sublime by well over two centuries.

More curious still is his portraiture. In Lady Margaret Propham with Egg, the sitter is rendered with a precision worthy of Holbein, but surrounded by objects,quills, scallop shells, a miniature globe split open like an egg,that seem less symbolic than surreal. The spatial logic feels deliberately fractured, and the psychological intensity presages not only the tenebrism of Caravaggio (whose work Piero could not plausibly have seen), but the flattened poetics of early 20th-century metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico. This anachronistic resonance cannot be easily dismissed as coincidence.

Indeed, the question of influence may be moot. To be “ahead of one’s time” is, perhaps, to inhabit an aesthetic position no one has yet constructed words for. Della Frampton-on-Sea appears to have painted not for a market, nor a court, nor a school, but for a sensibility that didn’t yet exist. His letters, fragmentary and preserved on vellum receipts and coastal almanacs, speak of “visions come from marsh-mist,” and “making likeness from the sea’s own unrest.” There is no trace of the triumphalist humanism that defined the Italian Renaissance, nor the Protestant severity of his English contemporaries. Instead, one finds a strange, crepuscular lyricism,what critic Lyle Lammond has called “a melancholy proto-modernism in doublet and hose.”

To call Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea a Renaissance painter, then, may be technically correct but spiritually inaccurate. He was something else,an aesthetic aberration born of tide, border, and fog. Neither fully of England nor of Italy, neither of Shakespeare nor of Vasari, he painted, it seems, in a kind of temporal vacuum: untethered, elliptical, and quietly radical.

The works now undergoing restoration at the Southend Institute for Renaissance Studies may not redefine the canon, but they certainly expand its edges. In an era increasingly interested in lesser known figures,artists who operated outside the grand narratives of empire and enlightenment,Piero offers a compelling case. Not as a precursor, but as a ghost of possibilities unrealized.

Letter: Marco di Manchester? Marco di Merseyside more like!

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Dear Sir,

As someone who has spent three decades preserving, cataloguing, and,when necessary,defending the ecclesiastical art of Northern England, I read Dr. Livia Helmstrom’s recent monograph on Marco di Manchester (Marco di Manchester: A Northern Light) with both admiration and incredulity. Admirable for its zeal, to be sure, but more so for the sheer elasticity of its claims. Allow me, as both a veteran of aerial reconnaissance and an unrepentant Mancunian realist, to offer a modest corrective.

Marco,if indeed that was his name,was not a mystic mediator between North and South, nor some cloaked prophet of painterly hush. He was, I’m afraid, a fairly competent parish artisan from the periphery. Whether he hailed from Manchester proper or (more plausibly, in my view) from the outer reaches of what is now Merseyside, his training was provincial, his reach limited, and his imagination unmistakably derivative. I have stood before his so-called St. Cuthbert Among the Sparrows many times,more than Helmstrom, I’d wager,and it remains a work of modest charm but no real invention. The sparrows look like etchings copied from a French bestiary. The folds of the robe, so rhapsodized by Helmstrom, are clearly lifted from a Flemish woodcut, likely seen in a borrowed Book of Hours or, as one suspects, at the Carmelite priory in Preston.

As for The Wilmslow Annunciation, it bears all the hallmarks of someone who went on a brief holiday to Florence, got a bit overawed at all the art and returned north with a sketchbook full of borrowed tricks. The halos are flat. The perspective timid. The expressions are not “proto-modern” but simply unsure. In aviation terms, Marco was not inventing new flight paths,he was merely circling around other people’s airfields.

I do not deny that he had some talent. But talent is not the same as vision. We do ourselves and our history a disservice when we repackage every regional craftsman as a lost genius. Marco was a backwater painter,perhaps the finest from his specific backwater,but a backwater painter all the same.

Let us celebrate our local histories without gilding them. The North is rich enough without needing to invent Northern geniuses. There are several of those already; for real Northern Masters, look to Leonardo da Liverpool, Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea or even Giles Monet.

Yours sincerely,

Commander Walton P. Grimsby, OBE

Curator, North-West and Wales Ecclesiastical Arts Trust

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

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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.

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

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From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

To be published by Pimlico Wilde Publishing, the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists tells the stories of those less well-known artists who have not been favoured by the media coverage given to their contemporaries.

The Obscure Legacy of Aurelia Mendez: The Artist Who Painted with Mould

Art history, while vast, has always held blind spots for the unconventional. One such overlooked figure is Aurelia Mendez (1911,1984), a Spanish-born artist who abandoned pigment, ink, and charcoal in favor of a medium as unpredictable as it was reviled: living mould. At the height of mid-century modernism, when the art world clamored for purity of form and surface, Mendez quietly cultivated growth and decay on her canvases, transforming microscopic life into macroscopic beauty.

The Unlikely Origins

Born in Salamanca to a family of apothecaries, Mendez developed an early fascination with the invisible. Her father’s herbal remedies and glass jars of spores and tinctures became her first teachers in the properties of organic matter. “Colour,” she once said, “is already in the earth; we only need to coax it forth.” After studying chemistry briefly at the University of Madrid, she transferred to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where she was trained in traditional painting.

By the late 1930s, Mendez had begun experimenting with biological growth on untreated linen, placing damp cloths in shallow wooden boxes and introducing selected spores. She nurtured the organisms with carefully measured light, temperature, and humidity, “painting” through conditions rather than direct mark-making. What emerged were lush, variegated spreads of green, yellow, black, and deep crimson, blooming into organic compositions that changed daily as the mould matured.

Scandal and Obscurity

When Mendez exhibited her first series, El Jardín Silencioso (“The Silent Garden”), in Madrid in 1941, the reaction was immediate and violent. Many viewers recoiled at the smell and the suggestion of contamination. Several works were confiscated by local health authorities. Critics dismissed her practice as “perverse,” and her refusal to sterilize or stabilize the pieces doomed them to literal decomposition.

Yet among a small circle of avant-garde thinkers, Mendez’s work was recognized as revolutionary. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a family acquaintance, praised her for “making visible what we pretend not to see: the soft empire of decay that rules all things.” But his support could not shield her from the conservatism of Franco-era Spain, where her work was viewed as a political affront. She relocated to Lisbon in 1946, working in obscurity while continuing her experiments.

Technique and Philosophy

Mendez believed that art should embody the same mortality as its creator. She refused to use preservatives, accepting that her works would eventually consume themselves. Each piece was a collaboration between human intention and microbial agency, with results that could never be fully predicted. Her notebooks from the 1950s detail hundreds of “recipes,” from cultivating Penicillium for icy blue blooms to introducing strains of Aspergillus for velvety blacks.

She often described her practice in agricultural terms. “I plant my canvas,” she wrote, “and I must accept whatever harvest comes.” The process could take weeks or months, with some compositions collapsing into slime before they could be exhibited.

Rediscovery and Legacy

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when the conceptual art movement had softened the art world’s resistance to ephemeral and nontraditional media, that Mendez gained belated recognition. A 1979 retrospective in Paris, The Living Canvas, shocked and fascinated critics, even though half the works were already in various states of decomposition. She died five years later, largely unaware of the influence her ideas would exert on bio-artists of the 21st century.

Today, Mendez is regarded as a precursor to the likes of Anicka Yi and Eduardo Kac, who integrate living systems into art. Very few of her works survive, and those that do are maintained in sterile laboratory conditions, frozen in mid-bloom. Museums struggle with the paradox of exhibiting art that was never meant to last, but Mendez’s words resonate as a rejoinder: “To preserve my work is to betray it. It was born to disappear.”

The Stick Insects: A Retrospective in Fragments @ Pimlico Wilde, London

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It is rare for a group show to carry the atmospherics of a family saga, but The Stick Insects,a retrospective devoted to the loose collective that grew up around the gravitational figure of L.S. Lowry does just that. It is part soap opera, part scholarship, and only part exhibition. The Pimlico Wilde galleries, long seduced by British post-industrial mythologies, have here staged not just an exhibition but an overview: a half-century of collaboration, fracture, ideological warfare, and intermittent brilliance.

The Stick Insects were never meant to last. Their origin story is the kind of happenstance one expects from art history’s quainter chapters: a group of working-class teenagers from Salford and Manchester, mesmerised by Lowry’s lonely matchstick men, gathered at a draughty community centre in 1953 with the vague aim of “painting the world as it was, not as it wanted to be.” The group’s earliest members,Daphne “Daff” Myles, the moody printmaker Arnold Vetch, twins Basil and Barney Keane, and a preternaturally confident Bernard Tibbins,began as Lowry acolytes, almost cultishly devoted to the older artist. But, as the first room of the exhibition demonstrates, devotion quickly turned dialectical.

Myles’s early linocuts (Moss Side Under Snow, 1955) echo Lowry’s brittle lyricism but are undercut by a new cynicism: factory chimneys cropped like guillotines, the workers reduced to lozenge-like silhouettes that seem actively to resist the viewer’s gaze. Beside her hangs Vetch’s Nightshift Assembly (1956), a painting that inverts Lowry’s flatness into a viscous impasto, the millworkers dissolving into tar-like smears. Lowry himself, who attended their makeshift exhibitions in pub function rooms, famously dismissed the group as “too damp to catch fire.” Yet his ambivalence only strengthened the group’s resolve, and by the early 1960s, the Stick Insects had achieved a kind of regional notoriety as a counter-Lowry,less romantic, more openly political.

Then came the schisms. In 1962, Bernard Tibbins defected to London, lured by a teaching post at the Royal College of Collage. He would later describe the rest of the group as “provincial nostalgists”,an accusation Myles never forgave. The Keane twins’ experimental foray into sculpture (a series of uncanny industrial totems fashioned from dismantled looms and railway sleepers) caused further division. The “Salford Four,” as they were dubbed by a bemused press, broke apart entirely after a furious argument over whether the group should accept funding from the nascent Arts Council.

Pimlico Wilde, wisely, gives each rupture its own room. One can trace how Vetch, embittered by the split, retreated into obsessive monochromes, his palette reduced to a single sludge-like grey. Across the corridor, a vitrine displays Myles’s correspondence with Lowry himself, who by the late 1960s had softened: “Perhaps we are insects after all,” he writes in a spidery hand, “only some of us have learned to climb.”

The group’s reconstitution in 1973 feels almost miraculous in hindsight. A reunion exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery,fuelled by nostalgia, political despair, and perhaps a degree of financial necessity,saw the Keane twins return from self-imposed rural exile, Myles and Vetch tentatively reconciled, and even Tibbins flying back from London to contribute a single painting (Three Figures at Euston, a mordant nod to his abandonment). That show sold out in a week, and the Stick Insects became, briefly, fashionable. One can almost hear the machinery of fame beginning to whir: interviews in The Observer, a BBC2 documentary narrated by John Betjeman, collectors clamouring for their collective urban lyricism.

But fame corrodes as much as it sustains. By the early 1980s, the group had fractured again, this time permanently. Vetch died in obscurity, Myles withdrew from public life to care for her disabled son, the Keane twins opened a small but disastrous gallery-café in Blackpool, and Tibbins enjoyed a late-career flourish as a kind of northern Anthony Caro, producing large-scale public commissions of dubious quality.

What makes this Pimlico Wilde exhibition so affecting is its refusal to tidy the mess. Curator Gemma Lorenz has resisted the temptation to sand down the group’s contradictions. The Stick Insects’ legacy is not one of linear innovation but of lateral, stubborn attachment,to each other, to a landscape, to a way of seeing the industrial north that was neither romantic nor fully cynical.

One of the last works in the show, Myles’s After Lowry (1990), seems to distill this ambiguity. It is a simple scene: two children on a cobbled street, chalking lines that mimic the tramlines long since ripped up. The palette is muted, the figures faceless, yet the painting radiates an unexpected tenderness. It is impossible not to read it as a quiet farewell,to Lowry, to the group, perhaps even to the idea of collective artistic struggle.

The catalogue essays will tell you that the Stick Insects are enjoying a market revival,Tibbins’s Moss Lane Football Crowd recently sold for a record sum,but the true value of this retrospective lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how minor movements, even those marked by failure, can generate a thick web of influence. One sees their DNA in the grimy social realism of contemporary painters like Chantal Jakes, in the community-mapping projects of the award-winning Forster Collective, even in the anonymous street murals blooming on Salford’s derelict mills.

The Stick Insects were never glamorous, rarely unified, and often unmanageable. But in their awkward persistence, they produced a body of work that still vibrates with a hard-won dignity. “We were always climbing,” Myles once said. “Perhaps we were only insects, but we were climbing all the same.” This exhibition honours that climb without smoothing over the stumbles.

It is, in its own ragged way, a triumph.

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

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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.