What happens when that eye leans ever closer into the screen and begins to watch and learn from the digital? All bets are off. What we see can have been reconfigured and reimagined in any number of ways. There is no need for truth, logic or limits.
That’s the tension I’m interested in – and maybe the space Blackbird Rook can help occupy. A place where artists and collectors aren’t just flung at each other with a price tag attached, but where there’s context, trust, and real dialogue. Where advice isn’t patronising, and enthusiasm isn’t cynical. Where someone helps you find your footing, whichever side of the equation you’re on.
As contemporary art history unfolds in real-time, the story of British abstraction is still being told. Its untapped richness is traceable through ‘known unknowns’ such as Hopkins, whose work links the post-war period with the present day.
The body is not a closed system. It is porous, soft, and yielding—subject to forces greater than itself. Kate Burling’s paintings linger on this uneasy truth.
