I remember sitting in a drafty backroom of a London gallery in the late nineties, watching a collector stare at a large-scale gelatin silver print with the same skeptical squint one might reserve for a confusing tax return. He wasn’t looking at the composition or the light; he was looking for the brushstrokes. For decades, […]
I remember sitting in a dusty studio in Cornwall back in ’94, watching a sculptor stare at a bill from a bronze foundry that was nearly triple what he’d budgeted for the materials alone. He looked at me like I was the enemy for asking why the numbers were so high, but the truth was […]
I remember a young painter, lovely girl, who came into my gallery ten years ago with a stack of beautiful lithographs and a look of absolute terror. She had been told by a “consultant” that her numbering system needed to be some esoteric, complex code to signify prestige. In reality, she was just making it […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded studio in the late nineties, watching a young artist try to explain his “limited edition” series to a very confused, very wealthy local collector. He was using all the right academic jargon, but the moment he stumbled over the technical distinction between a lithograph and a […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in 2012, watching a young artist try to explain a three-minute loop to a collector who just wanted to know if he could hang it above his sideboard. The collector looked baffled, the artist looked defensive, and I sat there realizing that the traditional rules of “objecthood” were […]
I remember sitting in the back of a drafty studio in 1998, watching a young man spend three thousand pounds on a high-definition video setup for a piece that lasted exactly twelve minutes. He thought the expensive lens would somehow capture the “soul” of the movement, but all he actually captured was a very pricey, […]
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. […]