Ok, crank alert. 🚨 Whilst it is such a pleasure to see Hurvin Anderson’s survey show at Tate Britain, I can’t contain this rant any longer. Why would any private collector of paintings think that it’s ok to put canvases in tray frames if the artist doesn’t present them that way? It’s such an appalling liberty to interfere with the image in this manner, imposing a border with no authority to do so, suffocating the picture and upsetting the balance of colours. In Hurvin’s case it’s particularly egregious, as part of what makes him the pre-eminent British painter of the last thirty years is his perfect judgement for when to box things in or when to leave them open-ended, and for how colours, tones and forms relate to each other. And so often the edges are a delicious nod to how the work came about, and it’s a crying shame to cover them up.
I have it on the very best authority that Hurvin asked for several of the works to be liberated from their tray frames for the exhibition, only to be told that Tate didn’t have the conservation resources needed to make it happen. Sorry, what are we doing here if an artist cannot have what they want on a point like that? I’d have paid into the crowdfunder myself to enable it if necessary, but it’s incredible that Tate could not prioritise that.
Some of the frames are particularly offensive. ‘Lower Lake’ (2005), sold at Christie’s London during Frieze week last year for £3.2m, is poorly positioned in a sub-Ikea abomination of a frame with a faux wood-effect laminate finish.
The final images are from Hurvin’s show at @ikongallery in 2013, before this tasteless aesthetic vandalism had taken hold.
Last week I was in conversation about my recent work with @jon_sharples at @ioneandmann , and @jackdavidlazenby at @sohohouse . A big thank you to them and to all the lovely people who made it along.
Amongst other things we talked about love and grief, our complex relationships to ‘home’, the wild Pennine landscapes of my childhood, painting, and the title of my show which relates to two extreme weather events that coincided with losing my Mum and Stepdad.
The first was Storm Eunice in 2022 and the second was a rare display of Mammatus clouds which were seen over London and the South East, in Feb 2025. There are times, especially when we are in heightened states of emotion that the external world comes to mirror our internal state…
It is the last two days of, Weird Weather. Closing drinks tomorrow 12-5pm x
When I was a child growing up in the American Northeast there were days in August where the heat and humidity hung in the air and clung to your body so heavily it felt difficult to breathe. You couldn’t see the moisture but you felt it — dense like stepping into a steam room. It would build and build across the course of the day like nausea and as evening would near, the sky would roil into a backlit, milky, yellow-orange with bruisey tinges of green. The atmosphere would begin to crackle leaving the fine hair on your arms standing on end. Finally, mercifully, the sky would crack open with electric fireworks and the rain would come. Not in dribs and drabs but suddenly, in sheets, a downpour to release all of what had mounted.
It was this process of emotional buildup and release which led to Jane Hayes Greenwood’s (JHG) stunning new body of work in her solo show, Weird Weather, jointly presented by @ioneandmann & @castor_gallery at lone & Mann’s Conduit Street space (on until 7 March).
Works in this series are deeply personal expressions of love and grief rooted in her recent experience of repeatedly returning to her childhood home in Hebden Bridge to care for her mother during the final months and weeks of her life. During that time, JHG stayed in her mother’s small bedroom, her view through the window a vast expanse of wild land, the home of generations of Greenwoods before her, and the tempestuous moods of the Northern skies, inverted cloud formations cycling though multiple seasons each day. While her mother slept she would venture out into the windswept landscape of the Brontës — through heathered moors, waterfall trails, and ancient Bridestones.
JHG says despite the outstanding beauty of her surroundings she couldn’t engage with that material during this time. Even starting to make studies was unthinkable, “It would have been obscene…just too close to those difficult emotions to make something from them.” It was only after returning to her studio in London following her mother’s passing that the skies broke and this series of landscape-grounded drawings and paintings dominated by surreal, atmospheric anomalies poured out. (1/2 continues in comments)
I saw “Wuthering Heights” last weekend and found its soaring, sensual excesses irresistible. The dramatic weather and the rugged Yorkshire moors were protagonists in their own right, as well as the perfect poetic analogy for the warped, grandiose, megalomaniacal teenage perception of what great love is.
Today I saw @janehayesgr ’s show ‘Weird Weather’, a collaboration between @castor_gallery and @ioneandmann , and was moved by the sensuality of the paintings and drawings and their origins in a creative deluge following the heaviest accumulation of personal circumstances in that same Yorkshire landscape.
I’m very much looking forward to having a public conversation with Jane at the gallery at noon on Saturday 28 February - come and join us for love, loss and more zeitgeisty insights.
Next Saturday on 28th February at 12pm at @ioneandmann (6 Conduit Street, London), I will be in conversation with Art IP Lawyer, collector and good friend, @jon_sharples . Jon and I have known each other a long time and we did our first in-conversation almost 10 years ago in the “garden” of my big solo, Lead Me Not Into Temptation, at Block 336 in 2017. Jon is very knowledgable about art and I’m really looking forward to talking about my recent work with him.
If you’d like to come, please RSVP through the link in my bio. Tickets are limited so if for any reason you are no longer able to make it, please kindly cancel your ticket ⛅️
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High Pressure, 2025
Oil on linen, 35 x 45cm
@ioneandmann@castor_gallery
SAVE THE DATE: Jane Hayes Greenwood In Conversation with Jon Sharples⚡️
𝗦𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟴 𝗙𝗲𝗯𝗿𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟮 𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻
JOIN US for an intimate discussion between artist @janehayesgr and Art and IP Lawyer and Collector @jon_sharples on the occasion of her solo exhibition 𝙒𝙚𝙞𝙧𝙙 𝙒𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧, co-presented with @castor_gallery .
The event is free but places are limited.
BOOK YOUR FREE TICKET to reserve your place through the link in our bio 🔗
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📍𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗘 & 𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗡
First Floor, 6 Conduit Street, Mayfair
Doors open at 11:45 am.
〜
Jane Hayes Greenwood: Weird Weather continues until 7 March.
Installation view by Matt Spour
#janehayesgreenwood #artisttalk #londongalleries #castorlondon #ioneandmann
I’m very excited to share this work that @savannahlmarie has made for our fledgling collection at @howardkennedy_law . Many thanks to Savannah for honouring us with her work, and to the great @jonnytanna of @harlesdenhighstreet for making it happen.
Savannah Harris’ (b. 1999) practice can be read as a stream of consciousness that ebbs and flows into complex environments. Informed by geological and archaeological processes, Harris’ paintings intuitively entangle geometric shapes, texture and colour, often incorporating sand as a symbiotic reference to deep time and ties to her Caribbean heritage.
‘Woodlands’ (2025) was created in response to the seasonal shift of spring, a time for new beginnings. The work was inspired by the rambles Harris takes in the natural spaces around her studio. She revives those experiences in the earthy tones and wild blossoms evoking familiar scenery whilst also re-exploring her memories of those scenes through her abstracted gestures. She considers the process of painting as exploring the “poetry of a place that unfolds over time”.
Woodlands (2025)
Oil on canvas
150 x 150cm
PART 2 of 2: On the site of the old town, Burri set out to create a life-sized monument, an immense work of land art which would echo experiments with cretti (or cracks in Italian) seen in his works on canvas, but this time set not in white paint, but in concrete over the ruins of what once was. The Cretto di Burri — 85,000m² of head-high concrete, poured into vast moulds recreating the former town’s layout, canonically encasing the remains of paving stones, corner shops, and domestic remains, split through with cracks following the old footpaths and roads that were once populated by nonnas chatting, cats lounging, and children mucking about.
Burri worked on the project between 1984-1989 until the project ran out of funds. He never saw the completion of his masterpiece. It was finally fully realised on 17 October 2015, the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Why do I tell you all of this?
It is this place over which we stand in the photos, a bardo, a blank map, somewhere between whiting out what once was and fully declaring that the past is still with us, its remains and detritus surfacing in places, revealing what lies under the surface. It’s the perfect metaphor for our little fledgling family and its multitudinal depths of the sometimes stock-still but mostly-churned pondwater silt of memory, trauma, and emotion we can’t help but swim in.
We hide in the in-betweens of this grand Columbarium, shout across it, clamber and scale its blank face tinted in places by granules of the past leaching through interstitial spaces, asking to be asked about. As a survivor, when asked, how do you tell a tale you’ve had to tell so many times it no longer feels your own? These blushes of reds, blooms of sun-bleached amber, washes of charcoal are lives atomised and reconstituted, unknowable in this re-formation. They tell their story as best they can. The beauty of it all is breathtaking.
A tomb, a mausoleum, a cemetery, a celebration. We dance over lives built and torn down and built again. We stand together and we build again. (2/2)
📷: @jon_sharples@russelltovey@talkart@falcionimarco
PART 1 of 2: In the early hours of 14 January 1968, a catastrophic earthquake shook the Valle del Belice in western Sicily devastating the wider area and razing the ancient small town of Gibellina to the ground. Across the valley up to one hundred thousand people were left homeless, scores were injured, and over one thousand people were killed.
The already underdeveloped region languished through a drawn out period of reconstruction and residents were eventually moved to the new town of Gibellina Nuovo, 20 km from the original site. The old town, now called Gibellina Vecchio, sat in quiet ruin.
As the local government looked to rebuild and revive the region, showcasing its potential for industry and urbanisation, they asked a number of artists to create works for the newly built town’s squares and public spaces. Alberto Burri, after touring the area, had other ideas. (1/2)
🎥: @jon_sharples
With thanks to @talkart ’s @russelltovey for mentioning
The Cretto di Burri On his recent episode with @falcionimarco , Creative Director of BOSS, which was just the reminder I needed to write this piece.
I’m very excited to be in conversation with @toejucker this evening to discuss his book ‘The Secret Painter’ (Sunday Times Bestseller and BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week), which tells the extraordinary story of his uncle, the self-taught Warrington artist Eric Tucker, who was discovered after his death to have produced over 500 paintings chronicling Northern working class life.
6.30pm, Waterstones Piccadilly - tickets link in bio.
“A timely reminder that art did not originate as an investment opportunity or a get-rich-quick scheme but as a way for human beings to make sense of their lives (plus make them bearable into the bargain). Miracles happen in the most unlikely places” - JARVIS COCKER
Many thanks to @canongatebooks for the invitation.
RECORDING: 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘵, 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭, 𝘓𝘰𝘺𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘔𝘺𝘵𝘩: A panel discussion with Michael Gao, Nicola Hicks, Jacopo Naccarato, and Becky Tucker, moderated by Jon Sharples
Saturday 20 September, 3.00 - 4.00 pm
A special conversation during 𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔, moderated by Jon Sharples — art and intellectual property lawyer, curator, broadcaster, avid collector, and lifelong dog enthusiast.
Bringing together exhibiting artists Michael Gao, Nicola Hicks, Jacopo Naccarato, and Becky Tucker, the panel will reflect on how their practices engage with the themes at the core of the exhibition: instinct and domestication, the entanglement of violence and care, and the myths we project onto animals.
Through painting and sculpture, each artist explores different ways the dog, and by extension, the animal, becomes a mirror for human desire, control, vulnerability, and imagination. This discussion opens up the symbolic, cultural, and emotional resonances of our oldest companion species, asking what these works reveal about both human and nonhuman natures.
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𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔 is a group exhibition that examines how the domesticated dog reflects the instincts, structures and contradictions of human behaviour.
Please follow the link in our bio to find out more about the exhibition.
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𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔
7 August - 21 September
Open Thursday - Saturday, 12:00 - 17:00
The Bottle Factory, 12 Ossory Road, London, SE1 5AN
𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘵, 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭, 𝘓𝘰𝘺𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘺 + 𝘔𝘺𝘵𝘩
A panel discussion with Michael Gao, Nicola Hicks, Jacopo Naccarato, and Becky Tucker, moderated by Jon Sharples
Saturday 20 September, 3.00 - 4.00 pm
Book via eventbrite 🔗 link in our bio
Comment 🐾 and we’ll send you the booking link directly
Join us for a special conversation during 𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔, moderated by Jon Sharples — art and intellectual property lawyer, curator, broadcaster, avid collector, and lifelong dog enthusiast.
Bringing together exhibiting artists Michael Gao, Nicola Hicks, Jacopo Naccarato, and Becky Tucker, the panel will reflect on how their practices engage with the themes at the core of the exhibition: instinct and domestication, the entanglement of violence and care, and the myths we project onto animals.
Through painting and sculpture, each artist explores different ways the dog, and by extension, the animal, becomes a mirror for human desire, control, vulnerability, and imagination. This discussion opens up the symbolic, cultural, and emotional resonances of our oldest companion species, asking what these works reveal about both human and nonhuman natures.
—
𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔 is a group exhibition that examines how the domesticated dog reflects the instincts, structures and contradictions of human behaviour.
Please follow the link in our bio to find out more about the exhibition.
—
𝓟𝓔𝓓𝓘𝓖𝓡𝓔𝓔
7 August - 21 September
Open Thursday - Saturday, 12:00 - 17:00
The Bottle Factory, 12 Ossory Road, London, SE1 5AN
