Art news

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

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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?

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.

Michelangelo’s Socks Fetch Record Price at Auction

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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.”

New work: Chester Hubble

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Brompton Road, 2025

In Brompton Road, Chester Hubble continues his quest to interrogate the porous boundary between corporeal fragility and urban indifference. Operating at the volatile intersection of land art, performance, and what he terms “auditory extremity,” Hubble offers not merely a body of work, but a body in work,plunged blindfolded into the arterial chaos of metropolitan life.

Each work emerges not from an intention, but a collision. Daily acts of perambulation,undertaken in a self-imposed state of visual deprivation and accompanied by esoteric heavy metal podcasts,are ritualised into what Hubble refers to as “memories of trauma and transcendence.” Only upon impact,be it with a bollard, a sandwich board, or the bonnet of a Lamborghini Aventador,does Hubble temporarily remove his blindfold, not to see, but to record. The result is a litany of encounters scrawled with forensic immediacy onto linen: “bicycle courier (rather agitated),” “warm dog,” “lightly bloodied scaffold pole (my blood).” These lists, staccato and spare, become textual reliquaries of embodied navigation, each one a whispered prayer to chance and damaged cartilage.

There is, in Hubble’s praxis, an almost monastic devotion to futility. “To be struck down is not failure,” he noted in a recent podcast appearance. “It is interruption. And interruption is a form of punctuation.” This tension,between the will to proceed and the inevitability of being halted,is central to the work’s power. In re-performing failed crossings, Hubble creates a recursive choreography of repetition and risk, confronting mortality not as a thematic gesture, but as a statistical likelihood.

To encounter Brompton Road is to be implicated in a larger topology of absurd devotion. It is not just the map that matters, but the bruises accrued along its path. And if art is, as Hubble suggests, “a way of making the invisible visible,” then this series may be his most visible work yet.

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

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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.

Priceless Renaissance Painting Lost in East London Pub After Being Left with Stranger ‘Whilst I went to the loo’

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In what may be the most appalling art theft of the decade, a priceless Renaissance painting by Sellario Mounteback, known as the Master of Cherbourg, has reportedly vanished from the Phoenix and Fire pub in East London , after being entrusted to a stranger “for just a moment” while its owner used the toilet.

The painting, believed to be an early 16th-century oil on oak panel, had only recently resurfaced after centuries in private hands. The owner, who has asked not to be named for fear of public ridicule, had brought the artwork to the pub in a nondescript canvas parcel, intending to celebrate its authentication.

“I asked a man at the next table if he wouldn’t mind watching my parcel while I popped to the loo,” the owner said. “He said yes and asked, quite politely, what was in it. I said, ‘Thank you , it’s a priceless early work by Sellario Mounteback.’”

According to the witness statement, the man’s response was unexpectedly knowledgable.

“The Master of Cherbourg?” he asked.

“I agreed. He said he would be delighted to look after it.”

With that, the owner went to the bathroom. Upon returning, both the man and the painting were gone.

“At first, I assumed he had some kind of emergency. Maybe he’d rushed off to the Royal London Hospital and taken the painting with him to keep it safe,” the owner explained. “But the police said what was more likely was that he had stolen it.”

Who Was Sellario Mounteback?

Sellario Mounteback, active circa 1510,1530, was a minor but increasingly celebrated painter of the Norman school, known for luminous portraits, lavish ecclesiastical commissions, and having been almost entirely forgotten until very recently. Dubbed the Master of Cherbourg by art historians for a series of unsigned devotional panels found in the crypt of a French priory, Mounteback’s works have seen a sudden surge in value following a 2023 retrospective in Bruges titled “Obscurity and Oak: Rediscovering Sellario Mounteback.”

The lost painting, believed to be “The Third St Veronica (With Sparrow)”, was expected to fetch upwards of £25 million at auction. Experts are calling the loss “a catastrophe”.

CCTV, Confusion, and Pints

According to pub staff, CCTV footage from the Phoenix and Fire was unfortunately “off” during the incident due to what the manager described as “an ongoing battle with the fuse box and some rather determined mice.” Witnesses remember the man in question only vaguely , “tallish, bit of a beard, smelled faintly of paint thinner and digestives,” said one local.

Police are reviewing pub tabs and interviewing regulars, but admit the trail has gone cold. “We are treating this as a theft,” said Detective Inspector Morley Finch. “While it’s not unknown for a suspect to correctly identify a Renaissance painter before fleeing with the goods, we’re not ruling anything out. Including the possibility that this was the world’s politest art heist.”

A Lesson in Trust

The owner is understandably distraught.

“You can’t trust anyone these days,” they lamented. “Not even blokes you meet in the pub.”

The art world remains hopeful the painting will resurface , ideally not at a car boot sale. In the meantime, auction houses have been alerted, and Interpol’s Art Theft unit is involved.

If anyone sees a suspiciously fine Renaissance oak panel painting for sale where a fine Renaissance oak panel painting shouldn’t be for sale, please contact authorities immediately.

How Hedge Fund Turned Capitalism Into Fine Art — Digitally

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How Hedge Fund Turned Capitalism Into Fine Art — Digitally

By Eleanor Griggle

In the shifting, feverish landscape of contemporary art, few figures have blurred the line between image and asset as elegantly,or as ruthlessly,as the artist known as Hedge Fund. Known for his digital portraits of amongst others, power brokers, startup founders, and radiant “market types,” Hedge Fund has achieved what might once have been unthinkable: he has made capitalism human again, or at least human-shaped.

Hedge Fund Art

His practice, centred on large digital prints, takes the tropes of portraiture,the face, the gaze, the illusion of individuality,and filters them through the antiseptic poise of financial aesthetics. What emerges are figures of capital itself: luminous, aspirational, perfectly indifferent.

When Hedge Fund released his Portrait of Margery Denton earlier this year,an immaculate digital print depicting the distinguished collector and CEO of Hanblee-Sevres , the art world momentarily fell silent. Denton’s face, flattened into planes of ochre, mauve, and jet black, stares out from the surface like a logo. The work sold, reportedly, before the file even finished rendering.

It was a fitting response for an artist who has turned representation itself into an asset class.

Portraiture in the Age of Capital

Hedge Fund’s recent output,his Digital Portraits series,has transformed the ancient genre of portraiture into a commentary on visibility, value, and self-branding. Each portrait begins as a high-resolution image of a sitter’s face but is then digitally reduced, recoloured, and recomposed until what remains is not just likeness, but a new form of currency.

In Margery Denton (2025), the dark sunglasses reflect nothing but void, while the lips gleam with the liquidity of a well-managed portfolio. It is both radiant and ruthless: a perfect balance of flattery and disinterest, humanity distilled into shareable iconography.

Collectors adore them. Critics argue over whether they critique wealth or celebrate it. Hedge Fund, of course, does neither. He simply renders the powerful as they already imagine themselves,flat, flawless, and frictionless.

The Executive as Icon

The sitters in these works are celebrities, but not in the traditional sense. They are executives, financiers, consultants, and collectors,the invisible elite who move markets from glass towers and encrypted lounges. By elevating them to the scale of pop saints, Hedge Fund reinvents corporate portraiture as a devotional act of capitalism.

The works’ simplicity is deceptive. Each digital print involves layers of processing that smooth imperfections while retaining the trace of individuality,a wrinkle, a glint, a pixel of rebellion. It’s this tension that gives the portraits their strange electricity: the friction between personhood and performance.

As one critic remarked at the Pimlico Wilde Gallery opening, “It’s like Warhol for the data age.”

A Style of Precision and Distance

Technically, Hedge Fund’s portraits are delightful. Printed on archival matte paper with market-like precision, they occupy a space between advertising and iconography. The palette,acid greens, finance greys, digital lavenders,feels drawn not from nature, but from the visual psychology of luxury branding.

The result is a portrait style that is immediately recognisable and entirely impersonal. The viewer is seduced and kept at bay. You can almost feel the smooth hum of capital beneath the image, a kind of quiet algorithmic heartbeat.

The Collector as Subject

Margery Denton’s portrait was another loop in Hedge Fund’s practice: the collector became the collected. It is both a brilliant gesture and cunning feedback – the art world rendered in glossy, pixel-perfect form. Denton herself, asked about the piece, reportedly replied, “I haven’t even looked at it, and never will. It is purely an appreciating asset. I don’t wish to see it – in my mind it is perfect.”

Since then, the waiting list for a Hedge Fund portrait has grown absurdly long, with rumours of prices – surely exaggerated – exceeding £500,000 per print. Hedge Fund’s art has almost become a managed financial instrument.

Between Irony and Icon

Hedge Fund’s genius lies in his refusal to position himself as satirist or moralist. His portraits are not jokes about capitalism,they are expressions of its aesthetic. The subjects are composed with reverence, their edges clean, their colour fields disciplined. Even the imperfections feel deliberate, calibrated to maintain value.

These works are sincere in their surface, honest about what they are: beauty as asset, status as art, art as life enhancer.

The Face as Future

What Hedge Fund has achieved, through his digital faces and precisely monetised editions, is a new form of portraiture for the digital aristocracy. These are not depictions of individuals; they are portraits of participation,each sitter immortalised at the intersection of visibility and valuation.

And so, as the art world debates meaning, Hedge Fund continues to mint it. His portraits, like shares, seem to appreciate with attention. His subjects, like brands, accrue aura through ownership.

Hedge Fund has forced the art world to reckon with a new kind of creative force , one where irony, code, and economics merge into a form of cultural currency that cannot be easily decoded, let alone dismissed.

In the end, Hedge Fund art is more than just image,it is prophecy: of art’s next phase, shimmering between algorithmic certainty and emotional representation. Every face becomes a future-forward balance sheet of self; a solid image surrounded by life’s myriad fluctuating values.

Hedge Fund has often remarked,at least half-seriously – that “skin tone is the new asset class.” His digital works treat complexion as currency, light as liquidity, and emotion as speculative volatility. The results are eerily seductive: smooth, sterile, and oddly calming. Get yours today!

“Cloud Ownership” by Davos Saved for the Nation — if the nation can raise £500,000

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In a quietly astonishing moment for British conceptual art, the work Cloud Ownership (2024) by Davos has been officially placed under an export bar, preventing its removal from the United Kingdom. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media, Singing and Sport has deemed the piece of “outstanding national importance,” citing its “singular contribution to the evolving relationship between art, property, and the ephemeral.”

Now, a consortium of public galleries is racing to raise the £500,000 required to keep it in the country. There is, however, no cloud in a crate, no installation to unbox. What they are trying to save, quite literally, is an idea.

A Monument to the Immaterial

Cloud Ownership was first “exhibited” in 2024 as part of Davos’ touring retrospective, Davos: Touring Retrospective. Visitors to the exhibition were issued a printed certificate, each entitling them to ownership of a cumulus cloud, tracked by satellite and renamed in their honour.

The terms of ownership were strict: the cloud could not be visited, photographed, influenced, or interacted with in any physical way. As Davos put it, “The cloud is yours precisely because it remains untouched by you. To own it is to let it pass.”

It is at once art that is absurd and profound. At a time when everything from tweets to rainforests is being commodified, Davos offered a piece of sky,unbuyable, unfixable, unpossessable,and asked whether ownership could be defined not by control but by consent.

Not for Sale Abroad

The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (RCEWA) issued the export bar last week following a private collector’s attempt to acquire the conceptual certificate and relocate it to a private archive in Geneva. Although the work has no physical form, the committee judged that its certificate,and the national context of its issuance,comprised an artwork of “distinctly British character and international conceptual significance.”

“This is not just a paper certificate,” said Dr. Lucinda Morley, chair of the committee. “It is a contract with the imagination, and a quietly radical gesture of stewardship. The idea that such a work might vanish into a vault, out of public mental reach, is antithetical to its meaning.”

The Race to Fund the Intangible

Now, galleries including The Ross on Wye Centre for Contemporary Art, the Blackchapel Gallery, and The Fruitmarket in Aberystwyth have launched a joint campaign to raise the estimated £500,000 needed to retain Cloud Ownership within the UK. The cost includes the certificate itself, artist’s rights, conceptual framework licensing, and an ongoing symbolic “tracking fee” for cloud-based satellite data,though, in typical Davos fashion, no actual satellites will be used.

“Some will scoff,” admits Caroline Dreyfus, director of acquisitions at the Blackchapel, “but this isn’t about buying weather. It’s about protecting one of the most quietly brilliant interrogations of value and authorship seen this decade.”

Already, philanthropic interest is high. There are rumours of cloud-owners,including poets, physicists, and at least one former Chancellor,pledging to help. Public support, however, has been more divided. One online commenter quipped: “Can’t we just print another certificate and call it ours?”,a question that goes to the very heart of the work.

Davos Responds

The artist himself,who rarely gives interviews,released a brief, handwritten statement through Pimlico Wilde gallery:

“Ownership is a form of attention. If the nation truly sees the cloud, then it is already here.”

A Precedent of Air

Whether the £500,000 target will be met remains to be seen. But Cloud Ownership continues to raise urgent and intriguing questions: What does it mean to “own” something we cannot grasp? Can an artwork be as much an agreement as an object? And can the state, with its customs forms and export bans, meaningfully legislate the invisible?

Doodle Pip wins the Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture: A Radical Rethink of Representation

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Doodle Pip Solihull Portrait Prize Winner

In a dramatic and paradigm-shifting moment for the British art world, the 2025 Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has been awarded to the enigmatic and uncompromising artist known only as Doodle Pip. Pip’s winning work , a line drawing that defies conventions of likeness, realism, and even recognisability , has stunned critics and delighted philosophers of art.

The image, a spidery, looping contour of abstract whimsy, bears only the faintest hint of a human face. Some have likened its energy to the automatic drawings of the Surrealists; others to the raw vitality of children’s art. Yet Doodle Pip’s intent is clear and strikingly original. As the artist has put it, “If my picture looks too much like the sitter, I start again. I want to convey nothing of the subject.” This, Pip insists, is portraiture stripped of ego, freed from the tyranny of likeness, and rendered into pure expression.

A New Kind of Portraitist

In a field traditionally governed by fidelity to the subject , from the dark psychological probes of Rembrandt to the cool celebrity gloss of Warhol , Pip’s anti-representational philosophy marks a bold departure. Like Murillo, Pip maintains a connection to human figures, but where Murillo sought beatific realism, Pip seeks only the trace of an encounter, not a depiction.

In this year’s competition, over 300 artists submitted entries , ranging from photorealistic oil panels to preposterous conceptual work, (I’m looking at you, Davos) . Among the shortlisted names were noted figurative painter Helena Voigt, whose brooding chiaroscuro portrait of her grandfather was widely tipped for the win, and textile-based experimentalist Leo Mensah, who stitched the face of his subject into a dense tapestry of mirrored thread.

But it was Pip’s drawing, titled Portrait of Janet, that arrested the judges’ attention.

Judges’ Statement

The judging panel, led by artist and academic Dr. Maureena Hathersley, praised the work as “a radical act of erasure and resistance against the hyper-visibility of the image in contemporary life.” In their joint statement, the panel noted:

“Doodle Pip has not merely disrupted the genre of portraiture; they have redefined it. By deliberately refusing resemblance, Pip forces us to question what , or whom , we are really looking at. The sitter dissolves. In their place, we find the pure gesture of the artist’s hand, an existential doodle that is both intensely personal and entirely anonymous.”

Fellow judge and gallerist Marco Chevalier added, “In an age obsessed with selfies and deepfakes, Pip’s drawing is a kind of visual haiku. It reminds us that a portrait is as much about absence as presence.”

A Cult Figure Emerges

Despite, or perhaps because of, their deliberate avoidance of biography, Doodle Pip has rapidly become a cult figure among young collectors and philosophers. Very little is known about the artist’s background, training, or even their real name. What is certain is that Pip sees the act of drawing not as a craft or a skill, but as an event , a temporal and ephemeral trace of thought, mood, and resistance.

In refusing to ‘capture’ the sitter, Pip liberates the viewer from the obligation to interpret a personality or identity. Their portraits become meditations on the futility of knowing another person, or even oneself.

A Turning Point?

The Solihull Portrait Prize for Portraiture has long been a bellwether for evolving approaches to portraiture, but this year’s decision may prove to be a truly watershed moment. Whether Pip’s work will inspire a new school of de-portraited portraiture remains to be seen, but already murmurs of “doing a Pip” are circulating through art colleges and online forums.

One thing is certain: with one beautiful piece, Doodle Pip has drawn a new boundary in the shifting sands of contemporary art , and, just as quickly, erased it.

Obituary: Elsinora Thistlebaum (1927–2025), Painter of Fruit

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Elsinora Thistlebaum, the internationally misunderstood doyenne of post-impressionist-neuroticism, passed away peacefully last Tuesday at her home in Bruges, surrounded by her seventeen cats and a bowl of her favourite oranges.

Born in a hot air balloon above Zurich during a thunderstorm in 1927, Thistlebaum was the daughter of an avant-garde mother, Isolde Thistlebaum, a woman best remembered for her works exclusively painted with melted chocolate. Elsinore’s father was the renowned Theobald Thistlebaum, best known for his treatise on the philosophy of chairs.

Thistlebaum’s artistic journey began at age four, when she scrawled a mural, later given the title Banana Ennui by her parents across the walls of the family’s greenhouse using only turmeric, yoghurt and fruit.

Her 1962 solo show, Fruit of the Looming Crisis, shocked the Paris art scene by portraying citrus fruit as symbols of bourgeois anxiety. Salvador Dalí called her “the only artist brave enough to truly paint an apple.”

Thistlebaum’s magnum opus, The Persistence of Plums, was banned in five countries, but nevertheless hangs in the Rochester Art Basement, next to Anton Spruggle’s cubist toaster.

In later life, Elsinore became reclusive, communicating only in haiku and the occasional accusatory letter to the Dortmund Times. Her final exhibition, Why Is This Melon Crying? was attended by over 2 million people, many of whom, as instructed by a wall text, left negative reviews and bought nothing from the gift shop.

She is survived by her cats,Artemisia, Pamplemousse, and Jeremy Stevens among them, and her PA Greg.

A private memorial will be held in the Dundee Gallery of Maritime Art, with guests requested to wear something that evokes her favourite fruit in some way. (Her favourite fruit was a kumquat).

In lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to bring pears.