The Weight of Absence: maternal grief in Käthe Kollwitz’s postwar art
A woman lies flat on her back, legs extended, and a child draped face down over her torso. Both are dead. This is Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922 work, The Widow II, part of her famous woodcut series, War, which she began producing in 1919 in response to the horrors of World War I. Seized by desperation,…
In conversation with the co-curators: Juanita McNeely at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
For this month’s edition of the Paper Galleries, I was graciously invited to speak with Tucker Drew and Tilde Fredholm at Lévy Gorvy Dayan about the gallery’s current exhibition on Juanita McNeely, organised in collaboration with James Fuentes Gallery in New York. Tucker and Tilde worked on the curation and research of the show alongside…
Why NFTs Failed as a Digital Art Medium
In his seminal work, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin makes the argument that there is a quality to the work as a material object that is absent when the formal content alone is reproduced and circulated; this, he names the ‘aura’ of the work. The reproduced work is inherently non-auratic; ‘aura’…
Opaque Dreams
’I’m not opaque. I’m so relevant I’m disappearing’ – Anaïs Duplan, ’One poem’ This line from One Poem by Anaïs Duplan was used by Legacy Russell in her theory of Glitch Feminism, which rejects categories through the abstraction of the body. When we embrace the error of a ‘glitch’, we reject a system of perfection…
What is missing in a Lucian Freud exhibition?
In the minds of many people, curatorship is associated with the ideas of selection, choice, and the power to decide what will be included and what will not be seen. However, during the recent Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting exhibition tour, organised by the Art Business Society in collaboration with the curatorial assistant involved in the show’s production, I found…
Public Art and The Politics of Perception
Walking around in London, you can’t help but notice the amount of statues within our public parks, squares and streets. Although I don’t always take note of each individual being commemorated, I know that a largely singular narrative is being perpetuated in these sculptures: the seeming normalcy of white maleness. This is not just my…
Another Rave Review: Tracey Emin’s A Second Life
Tracey Emin’s landmark exhibition ‘A Second Life’ threw itself into the London Artscape at the end of February. Her ‘Sex and Solitude’ at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence last year left me wanting more. The major retrospective, held at the Tate Modern, spans the entirety of Emin’s career from the late 90s to today and includes paper works, embroidered blankets, bronze sculptures, appropriated objects, neons, video art, and large-scale canvas paintings. I…
Tarsila do Amaral’s Vision of Modern Brazil
The painting Central Railway of Brazil (1924) by Tarsila do Amaral reflects the transformation of Brazilian culture during the early twentieth century. Created during a period of intense artistic experimentation, the dynamic piece exemplifies the principles of Brazilian modernism by combining simplified forms, vibrant colour, and symbolic references to modernization. Through her treatment of shape,…
Furuhashi’s Lovers Escape into ChatGPT
In the week leading up to February 14th, I attended Elliot Gibbons’s lecture on the Kyoto-based art collective Dumb Type, its founder Teiji Furuhashi, and his immersive installation Lovers (1994). It struck me that this chronological “coincidence” resonated less with the conventional anticipation of Valentine’s Day than with the spirit of Anti-Valentine’s Week – a…
On ‘Immersive Exhibitions’ and Being Present
The question of ‘immersion’ when facing an artwork is brought into a curious precarity through the emergent phenomenon of ‘immersive exhibitions’. These are typically understood as a digital spectacle, where visitors walk through altered projections of famous artworks, dramatically increasedin scale and rendered in such a way that viewing the whole image at once becomes an impossibility. The projectioncomes to encompass the entirety…
From ‘Un-House’ to Geodesic Domes: Architectural Experimentations of 1960s-70s
In 1965 article “A Home is Not a House” for Art in America magazine, Reynar Banham coined the concept of ‘un-house’ – one that radically deviated from the traditional idea of a house by being a mere shell to conceive services such as heating, cooling, and plumbing. Banham noted upon the society’s trend to seek…
The Theological Collapse of Concrete Cathedrals
Egyptian Architect Abdelwahed El-Wakil said ‘We die and our buildings die with us’ in response to the temporal nature of modern buildings. He saw modern architecture as a space of dissonance between the world of nature and the world of the human. But what about the space beyond nature? What about buildings devoted to faith?…
Behind the exhibition: A Conversation with Curator Miriam Kanner
I recently interviewed Miriam Kanner, a writer here at Paper Galleries, and a second-year History of Art student at UCL who recently curated two exhibitions at Arc London. Her first exhibition, Moving in Translation, became the first solo show for the artist Zoya Ilina, presenting landscapes and still lifes from various cities the artist had…
Art and Ruler: The War Over Visual Culture
Art has almost always been a political battleground. It has been harnessed by rulers, suppressed by dictators and controlled by states, all of whom understood it to be a vital source of power. Despite being a mode of expression, artistic production can be easily exploited as a tool for societal repression through both censorship and…
Emily Ponsonby on seeing “Through Butter”
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, we’re encouraged to spend a little more time and put in a little more effort for the ones we love. It reminds me of the work by an artist I recently discovered this past October; on a little pre-Frieze gallery hop, I was drawn into the wonderful Gillian Jason…
Light in the Paintings of John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished painters of light in late nineteenth and early twentieth century art. Across his portraits, landscapes, and murals, Sargent uses light not merely to illuminate form but to structure composition, convey atmosphere, and articulate social and psychological meaning. His approach synthesizes academic training, Impressionist…
On Muses, On Venus, On Fantasy
The reproduction of the female form in art history becomes as exploitative as its consumption. The female body must perform the function of Madonna or whore, the lustful or the shameful, the desired or undesirable. We seem to be controlled by a binary, where a woman must become the entire essence of something idyllic, lacking…
Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates: a convergence of language, thread, and history
Watching Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates will make you feel as if you’re wandering through endless rows of a colourful market fair. The patterned rugs alongside antique vases, the rich textiles and archaic manuscripts, the nacreous shells, the candleholders, the flowers — all compete for your gaze with their allure. The same…
An Iconographic Walk through the National Gallery with Roma Liberov’s Reflections
On 16 January, The Arc London in Fitzrovia opened Roma Liberov’s solo exhibition Reflections: “a poem is as real as a utility bill”, which I had the privilege to curate. The show brings together a series of mixed-media photographic works created over the past two years of the artist’s life in London. Liberov’s practice, long…
Rethinking Art in 2026
Historically, the art market has been perceived as a closed sphere: a world concentrated between London and New York, where key positions are taken by blue chip galleries and major auction houses trading highly priced masterpieces. However, in recent years this landscape has begun to shift, driven by rapid technological advancements and an increasingly volatile…
The Missing Touch: Why AI Can Never Create True Art
Generative AI has advanced to the point where it can produce visual outputs from written prompts, creating images that often appear symmetrical, lifelike, and perfectly smooth. Such qualities have sparked debate over whether such works can be considered true art. Take Indian designer and artist Amith Venkataramaiah, who uses the generative AI programme Midjourney to…
Sun-Drenched Stillness: Colour and Memory in Bermudian Art
This winter, I had the pleasure of being back in my home country, and attending two fantastic exhibits put on by Masterworks Bermuda and the Bermuda National Gallery. These showings in Bermuda present a compelling opportunity to reflect on colour, light and place through two thoughtful exhibitions at the island’s major art institutions. At the…
The Art of Nature & The Nature of Art
Not all art is meant to be hung on a wall, and maybe with the over-commercialisation of artworks in the modern world it shouldn’t need to be. Recently I’ve seen a lot of discourse on the apparent soullessness and emptiness of art fairs and exhibitions geared towards buyers not viewers. Suggesting that personal experience and genuine story…
Enduring the Cold: Winter in Sixteenth Century Flemish Genre Scenes
During the cold winter days, we tend to spend time with our loved ones, enjoy the flicker of garlands, and quietly contemplate the year from the warmth of our home. Naturally, everyone has their own traditions and rituals – some private, some shared. Yet, it is especially in the winter that there seems to be…
Paris in The White Cube: Exhibitions Not to Miss Before Le Réveillon
Now, if like me, you have suddenly found yourself on a Eurostar last week, bound for Paris at the tail end of the first term, finishing the last of your coursework, while rushing to embrace friends and family, to mark Catholic Christmas, Hanukkah and other holidays under the bells of Notre-Dame, I assume you have…
Technologies and Bodies: from Umberto Boccioni to Angela Sanatana
Technological progress has always had a profound impact on culture, shaping the ways people live and perceive the world. These shifts have often been reflected in art, as artists respond to changing conditions of everyday experience. In the early twentieth century, Italian Futurists were fascinated by the rapid development of modern technologies, particularly the automobile, which dramatically…
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: The Intersection Between Religion and Eroticism
Like the sun catching the peak of a wave, glinting as it ebbs and flows, light falls down upon The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque sculptural altarpiece is the centre of a 360 degree commission from the Cornaro family and a humanisation of the tales of the eponymous Teresa of Avila, a…
Why Do We Love Yoshimoto Nara?
If you’ve seen a pair of opalescent eyes staring at you from the back of a laptop, or a phone case, the chances are that it’s one of the bright-eyed girls painted by Yoshimoto Nara. Born in 1959 in post war Japan, Nara has nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984, and it seems like he’s…
Giorgio de Chirico’s Il Trovatore
I first saw Il Trovatore at Frieze London on a day when the fair felt especially loud. People drifted in and out of booths, discussing contemporary artists, as I watched the strange distortions of the tent. Dozens of viewers beelined across curated walls. I turned into a quieter corner of the Hauser & Wirth presentation to then face Il Trovatore. When describing…
28/11/2025 HOAS Winter Social
The society’s first independent winter social was a rather successful endeavor, though there was an excess of food, drinks, and an overall sense of debauchery not in the least helped by the choice of entertainment: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, projected on the screens. The event’s strange circumstances – being Christmas themed, complete with mince pies and…
Paper Galleries 