The only living (or your lonely saucer eyes), 2007, Brian Griffiths
art advisor
At the moment, Blackbird Rook is moving in several directions at once, although they are more connected than they might first appear: The Satiric Grotesque, Harry Woodrow’s strange jacuzzi paintings, the forthcoming Clyde Hopkins book, new works on paper and a careful return to selected secondary-market work. This is a catch-up, but also a small statement of intent - about judgement, diligence, pleasure, risk and looking properly.
The Satiric Grotesque brings together artists who use distortion, humour and bodily unease to make the human image slip. Across painting, collage, drawing and sculpture, faces become masks and identity becomes staged - comic, unsettling, excessive and sharply revealing.
New works on paper by Justin Mortimer - all available.
These pieces sit at the heart of Mortimer’s practice. Not studies, not afterthoughts - but works in which the image feels unusually raw, immediate and alive. Fragments of figure, surface noise, rubbed-out marks and pasted elements all held in a kind of suspended tension.
They have the same psychological unease and visual intelligence as the larger paintings, but with a freshness that belongs particularly well to paper. Beautiful in reproduction, but exceptionally good in the flesh.
Blackbird Rook and General Assembly present Alien Hand - Alison Blickle (Los Angeles) and Irini Karayannopoulou (Athens) - 6-21 March 2026, 12 Saint George Street W1S. Painting as possession: mythic bodies, glamour and unease, control and release. Studio as visitation.
