A Michigan collector is finding new homes for work he’s spent more than twenty-five years buying. I’m sharing a selection at ridiculous prices, alongside news of my expanded role at Plaster and the Substack archive.
A painting in storage can have an excellent exhibition history, but it still needs somebody to get it out again. In 1980, John Hoyland selected Clyde Hopkins for the Hayward Annual. In 1986, Hopkins and Frank Bowling had concurrent exhibitions at the Serpentine. Their subsequent visibility tells us something about how art history gets made.
APT Open Studios
Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September 2026
1–6pm both days
6 Creekside, Harold Wharf, Deptford, London SE8 4SA
Discover four contemporary artworks in August’s Collector’s Note, with insights on emerging artists, collecting and the culture of the art world.
Blackbird Rook and General Assembly are pleased to present In Dialogue, an exhibition ; that brings the work of Marilyn Hallam (b.1947) into dialogue with Ellie MacGarry (b.1991). Across generations, both artists explore the architecture of interior life - through doorways, mirrors, windows, fabric, and the quiet gestures of domestic space.
A show that spans forty years shouldn’t feel contemporary in every direction at once, yet What Remains of the Day does exactly that. In pairing Marilyn Hallam and Ellie MacGarry, the exhibition opens up a conversation about how painters organise attention, how interiors become states of mind, and why the language of modernism keeps resurfacing when we think we’ve left it behind. This is a quiet show, but it has a long reach.
Curated by Irini Karayannopoulou
July 10th - September 14th
Alexios Tjoyas. Alison Blickle. Alison Jones. Andreas Vais. Angeliki Stamatakou. Antonakis Christodoulou. Damien Deroubaix. Eleanna Horiti. Efstathios-Alexandros. Zoulias. Helen Flockhart. Irini Karayannopoulou. Kasia Kay. Loukia Alavanou. Marianna Hatzinikolaou. Matt Morris. Nicholas Zirk. Peggy Kouroumalos. Sharon Kivland. Sofia Kouloukouri. Theo Michael. Zoe Xenaki
Alison Blickle, Cult of Artemis, 2019
The body opens again. A second cut, a deeper layer. Anatomia Humana – Part II continues the exploration of what it means to inhabit a human form. The surface gives way to sediment: rituals, desires, and systems encoded beneath the skin.
If the body was ever a map, it was always incomplete. The need for continuation arises from the impossibility of conclusion. To be human is to unfold—layer upon layer, nerve after nerve, spell entangled with tissue.
This exhibition extends the anatomical hunt with the soft, radical curiosity of the witch, the poet, the philosopher, and the artist. What remained dormant in Part I begins to stir: the secret organs of collective memory, the haunted chambers of violence, the energies of the feminine occult.
Theo Michael, Humans Whatever, 2023
Where Plato sought the soul in symmetry, we trace it in rupture—in rituals forgotten by history but carried still in bone. Whitman sang of multitudes. This is their echo: politicized, eroticized, reborn in clay, pigment, paper, photographic image, and finally, flesh.
The works gathered in Anatomia Humana – Part II open the human soul as a porous anatomy—leaky and excessive. A body in dialogue with its shadows and doubts. A psyche hosting hauntings: personal, historical, planetary.
To extend is to allow for deviation. This exhibition welcomes that deviance. It becomes a site of psychic excavation and erotic knowledge, a cartography of wounds and wonders. The body as vessel begins to overflow. The act of looking inward becomes an act of revolt. To study the human now is to engage the systems that name, control, and obscure it.
Anatomia Humana – Part II offers a political anatomy, a sensual one, a mystical one. It listens to the body as a terrain, ripe with symbols, codes, and screams.
Irini Karayannopoulou, The Ritual, 2014
The Curator - Irini Karayannopoulou
Irini Karayannopoulou is an artist, curator, and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, moving image, and publishing. She is the founder and editor of Janus femzine, a publication dedicated to erotica and feminism. As one half of the filmmaking duo Twin Automat, she co-directs experimental films and visual essays that blur the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and animation. Karayannopoulou has exhibited widely, with presentations at MoMA Warsaw, Polana Institute, DESTE Foundation, MOMus Museums, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Hydra Book Club, Nosbaum Reding, State of Concept, PCAI, Istanbul '74, Antonopoulou gallery and Mona Athens. She has recently curated Magic Mirror in Hydra island and Anatomia Humana I & II, both presented by Blackbird Rook. She lives and works in Athens.
