I remember a Tuesday afternoon in 2004 when a collector walked into my gallery, stared at a pile of discarded industrial felt for three minutes, and asked me if I was actually joking. He wasn’t being rude; he was genuinely confused by the gap between the physical object and the price tag. This is the […]
I remember sitting in a drafty, white-walled studio in 2004, watching a young painter try to explain why his work couldn’t be called “Abstract Expressionism” because it was “too emotionally urgent” for such a reductive label. It was exhausting. The industry loves to pretend that how contemporary art is categorised is some sort of divine, […]
I remember sitting in a dusty corner of a London auction house in the late nineties, watching a man in a bespoke suit weep over a landscape that looked like it had been painted by a very talented, very bored teenager. He was talking about the “spiritual transcendence of the era,” but let’s be honest: […]
If you ask a university professor about the movement, they’ll give you a lecture on light refraction and the rejection of the Académie. They make it sound like a polite revolution of aesthetics, but they completely miss the messy, commercial reality of how impressionism changed practice for the people actually trying to make a living. […]
I remember sitting in a cramped, drafty studio in the late nineties, watching a young painter tear apart a canvas because a critic had called his work “derivative” of a movement he hadn’t even heard of. It was infuriating. People talk about art history as if it’s a series of lightning strikes, but the reality […]
Stop looking for a hidden map or a secret code in a splatter of cobalt blue; you aren’t solving a riddle, and quite frankly, the artist probably didn’t leave one for you to find. I spent twenty-six years watching collectors stand in front of canvases with their brows furrowed, desperately trying to figure out how […]
If you listen to the academics, they’ll try to convince you that how abstraction happened was some grand, inevitable teleological shift in human consciousness. They’ll serve it up with a side of heavy jargon about “shifting paradigms” and “the dissolution of the object,” making you feel like you need a PhD just to look at […]
If you listen to most art historians, they’ll try to sell you a tidy, academic fairy tale about how perspective developed as if it were a sudden, divine spark of genius that landed in Florence one Tuesday morning. They love to talk about Brunelleschi and the math of it all, wrapping the whole thing in […]
I remember standing in a drafty, white-walled gallery in the late nineties, watching a particularly pretentious critic use words like “ethereal luminescence” to describe a landscape that was, quite frankly, just a well-placed dab of titanium white. It’s the same nonsense I see today: people treating the physics of optics like some sort of mystical, […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded, dimly lit studio opening in 2004, watching a young painter try to explain his “conceptual use of light” to a very confused collector. He was using all the right academic buzzwords, but the painting itself felt utterly limp, like a soufflé that had collapsed the moment […]