

Overheard at Frieze...
Eliza Pritchett Conversations in Couture: What They Wore, What They Said: Frieze Week, London 2025 At the edge of Regent’s Park, a quiet, pensive queue of people moves up the gentle ramp: slow, sludgy, and rich. The sort of crowd you never see on an average London day. The ramp may as well be a red carpet. Judging by the number of Birkins being clutched by women (and men), the fair was in for a profitable weekend. Behind me, a French family of four. I admired twins in matchin


Behind the Scenes with Simon Castets: Rethinking Institutions Across Generations and the Paris Art Scene
Yuval Aluf LUMA Arles... Photo: Adrian Deweerdt. Courtesy of LUMA Arles. Paris Art Basel hums with the usual urgency; collectors move from booth to booth as conversations drift between languages. Stickers are quickly changed from green to red under the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais Éphémère. Amid the commotion, I meet Simon Castets in a quiet café nearby, where the pace finally slows enough for reflection. After nearly a decade running New York’s Swiss Institute, Castets


Flowers for the living: Calla Lillies and the Politics of Representation
Bowie Sharp Hernández, Judithe La Bruja y su Gato, 2009 pastel on paper Paper: 30 x 44 in. Framed: 27 1/8 x 34 7/8 in. Courtesy of the Artist Riverside Art Museum (RAM) The streets of Los Angeles are quieter than usual. In neighbourhoods once buzzing with life, the fruit vendors are missing from their usual corners, the sounds of commerce have dulled, and storefronts are boarded up. A hush of unease drapes the city like a morning fog. Here, where the Hispanic or Latino commu


Everyone’s invited! A review of Cecil Beaton’s House Party at the National Portrait Gallery
Flora Gilchrist Audrey Hepburn in costume for My Fair Lady , 1963 Cecil Beaton Archive © Condé Nast Photography acts as an imaginative tool, able to capture landscapes and windows into what once was. Positioned at the height of new optical technology, photography in the early twentieth century especially filled this liminal, transcendent space of reimagining people through a lens. The work of Cecil Beaton captures this optic essence perfectly, acting as a literal manifestatio


The Ancestral: Afro-América
Flora Gilchrist Mayara Ferrão, Álbum de Desesquecimentos, 2024. On display at The Ancestral: Afro-América exhibition at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB), August 2024. Brazil has a complex, substantial and interconnected relationship with West African countries and North America. Ancestral ties from Brazil’s role in the transatlantic slave trade as a Portuguese colony transporting and receiving slaves from Nigeria, coupled with the modern-day movement of immigrant


Notes on Gareth Lloyd’s Figures of Clay
Yulia Kim Selected for RE: VISION, 16th East Wing Biennial. Figures of Clay by Gareth Lloyd, 2023. Credit: Gareth Lloyd Studio Gareth Lloyd’s Figures of Clay does not settle as a painting but drifts into view like an apparition. A folding table, drawn with spare lines, anchors us in the ordinary, yet the objects resting on it begin to slip away from certainty. They appear in a faded graphite green, half-emerging, half-dissolving, as if memory itself were trying to take sha


Loo La La! Why the Toilet Is Fashion’s Most Essential Space.
By Lexie Patterson ‘Who is the real you?’ Alessandro Michele ponders aloud on Bella Freud’s YouTube series Fashion Neurosis. ‘Maybe it’s the one who comes out of the toilet, not the one inside.’ Just months earlier, on 10 March 2025, he had staged his Valentino show inside a blood-red public bathroom- mirrors, cubicles, tiles and all. Feverish and burning hot. It channeled the bold glamour that Valentino, the iconic Italian fashion house known for its red-carpet elegance it h


Artemisia Gentileschi, Heroine in Action
Kitty Perring Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant , c. 1615. Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence. © Gallerie degli Uffizi. I began my visit to Artemisia: Heroine of Painting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with a simple question: how would the gallery frame an artist whose biography so often overshadows her work? The exhibition was laid out over several rooms that explored different aspects of her biography, moving from her comparison with contemporaries t


Material Deprivation and Unrelenting Commitment: Making One’s Own Fortune Cards in the Work of Robert Coutelas.
Emma Henwood Robert Coutelas: In Search of Small Gods, Robert Coutelas, Fitzrovia Chapel, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards, Pale Horse. Pale Horse Gallery’s debut exhibition Robert Coutelas: In Search of Small Gods features over 100 paintings by French artist Robert Coutelas (1930-1985). The exhibition is currently housed at the intimate, yet opulent Byzantine influenced Fitzrovia Chapel until the 31st of October. The exhibition will then move to the gallery’s new permanen


Gilbert and George: More Outrageous Stained Glass
Lexie Patterson P.S. Be nice, and pretend to be shocked ‘HA- HA’. Laugh. They’re still trying to scandalise. (Credit: by Gilbert & George, 2022, photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the Hayward Gallery) Gilbert and George are back at the Hayward Gallery, bringing their lurid, stained-glass visions of sex, money, fear, crime and death to the Southbank. But it all feels a little déjà vu. They’ve been staging the same spectacle for decades. The ever-provocative duo, who met at Cent


