Blackbird Rook will be open from Wednesday - Sunday to coincide with London Gallery Weekend.
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.
Together, Werring’s sculptures, paintings, and monoprints form a cohesive exploration of duality and transformation. His works invite viewers into a space where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, where boundaries between forms dissolve, and where meaning is discovered in spaces that often go unnoticed.
This new body of paintings combines aerial landscapes and floating shapes - figuration, colour-fields, texture and abstraction. ‘Kites' are seen from above - painted with brush, roller and airbrush. They are textured and evidence process and changes in direction through overlapping layers. They show clean, machine-like fades and colour blocks that overwrite thoughts, mistakes and past potential futures.
When we talked about his current position relative to his painting, his reference to a previous Stuart Cumberland as the author of the work suggested that there might be rich parallels to be drawn between working with Cumberland’s painting, working with an artist’s estate and questions of authorship around painting and post-conceptual painting in particular.
'Value Value Value’ brings together 9 artists whose work shows a willingness to collapse and renew recognisable authorship - artists who work so continuously on an artwork that often nothing recognisable of the artist’s hand remains - artists who lose themselves so completely in the activity that they become more synonymous with the chosen tool in the labour of making, than the final artwork itself.
