Blackbird Rook

27/05/2026

Today I’m delighted to be posting the advance copies of the first Blackbird Rook book publication, made in collaboration with Anomie Publishing: Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper. The first copies are going to those who contributed to the writing, editing and design: Matt Price, Chloe Green, Matt Lippiatt, Joan Key, David Ryan, David Sweet and Joe Gilmore.

The book focuses on Hopkins’ extraordinary works on paper from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s - a period of restless invention, formal intelligence and evolving clarity.

I am so happy with the book. It is a beautiful thing - thoughtful, serious, elegant and full of life.

Co-published by Anomie Publishing, London, and Blackbird Rook.

https://blackbirdrook.com/store/clyde-hopkins-paintings-on-paper

24/05/2026

The old high/low distinction has more or less collapsed. Good. But something awkward has followed.

If opera is not automatically better than soap opera, it does not mean everything is equal. If Big Brother, cartoons, toys, horror films, bad taste, family photographs, memes and supermarket packaging can all become material for art, it does not mean they have already become art.

The question is not where the reference comes from. It is what the work does with it. Reference is not transformation. Access is not achievement. Inclusion is not judgement.

This week’s piece follows on from last week’s essay on judgement - asking what happens after the old cultural hierarchy has failed, and why good art still has to earn what it touches.

Link in bio

https://open.substack.com/pub/blackbirdrook/p/after-high-and-low?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

22/05/2026

A Blackbird Rook viewing room bringing together recent works on paper by Justin Mortimer - fractured bodies, broken screens, afterimages, stains, joins and unstable spaces.

https://blackbirdrook.com/justin-mortimer-viewing-room

Contemporary Painting

20/05/2026

This week’s One Piece Worth Seeing, on Substack, looks at Clyde Hopkins’ Cap D’Ennis, Barcelona (X), 1989-91.

I wanted to return to Hopkins’ works on paper because they keep surprising me. They are not studies, rehearsals or smaller versions of the paintings. They feel immediate, unstable, worked and complete - as if paper allowed Hopkins to think faster, without thinking less seriously.

This particular work catches him at a fascinating moment, somewhere between the darker, more gestural paintings of the 1980s and the stranger, sharper, more patterned language that followed. It carries Po***ck, Miró, London, Barcelona, graffiti, architecture, humour, doubt and a certain abrasive beauty - all without settling neatly into any one of those things.

It is a serious painting that does not want to sound serious all the time, which is one of the reasons I keep going back to it.

Find Blackbird Rook on Substack - link in bio

20/05/2026

I’ve just published this week’s One Piece Worth Seeing on Substack, looking at Clyde Hopkins’ Cap D’Ennis, Barcelona (X), 1989-91.

I wanted to return to Hopkins’ works on paper because they keep surprising me. They are not studies, rehearsals or smaller versions of the paintings. They feel immediate, unstable, worked and complete - as if paper allowed Hopkins to think faster, without thinking less seriously.

This particular work catches him at a fascinating moment, somewhere between the darker, more gestural paintings of the 1980s and the stranger, sharper, more patterned language that followed. It carries Po***ck, Miró, London, Barcelona, graffiti, architecture, humour, doubt and a certain abrasive beauty - all without settling neatly into any one of those things.

It is a serious painting that does not want to sound serious all the time, which is one of the reasons I keep going back to it.

Click through to read the full piece on Substack.

Clyde Hopkins, Cap D’Ennis, Barcelona (X), 1989-91

17/05/2026

“Each to their own” sounds generous. Sometimes it is, but in art it can also become a way of avoiding judgement altogether - a polite little escape hatch that lets bad work, weak thinking and market-backed decoration pass unchallenged.

This week’s Diary of an Art Advisor asks what we mean when we say art is good. Not in the old snobbish sense of “good taste”, and not as some grand universal theory of aesthetics, but as a practical, argued, revisable form of looking. Because taste and judgement are not the same thing.

You can like something and know it is flimsy. You can dislike something and recognise its force. You can be bored by serious work and delighted by work that is not serious at all. The interesting part begins when we stop pretending those things are identical.

The piece looks at degree show marking, outsourced taste, rich people buying terrible art, the market’s love of instant legibility and why some works die on the wall while others keep acting on you years later.

Bad comedy tends to die in the room, but bad art can survive for years on framing, price and collective nervousness.

12/05/2026

Zoe Spowage in great company at Dance Out, 2026, Royal West of England Academy (RWA) Photography Alastair Brookes/KoLAB Studios



Image: Zoe Spowage, Ballet, living on compliments, 2023, Conte pastel, acrylic and dye on canvas, 153 x 225cm

12/05/2026

Harry Woodrow,
HCTWJ09, 2024Acrylic on MDF and wood panel with radiused front and back edges150 × 150 × 7cm

Showing in Private Jets
May 7 – June 4, 2026

In HCTWJ09, the cream shell is steadier and more muted, with purple cushions and dark fittings giving the work a faintly bruised elegance. The tub seems to hover between showroom object and archaeological find - a luxury form already becoming a relic of its own promise. Woodrow lets the surface carry traces of handling, heat and residue, so that the fantasy of cleanliness begins to feel worn, human and oddly vulnerable.

View at blackbirdrook.com

bath

11/05/2026

Very pleased to see Zoe Spowage included in such strong company.

Dance Out
RWA - Royal West of England Academy
Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX
9 May - 9 August 2026

Paul Dash, Amy Dury, Tracey Emin, Denzil Forrester, John Lyons, Melanie Manchot, Paula Rego, David Remfry, Zoe Spowage, Gillian Wearing and Dorcas Casey.

Dance Out brings together painting, drawing, film, sculpture and sound to explore dance as something both private and collective - a way of moving through the world, but also of belonging to it. From nightclub culture and Carnival to solitary movement, folklore, film and the social charge of the dancefloor, the exhibition looks at dance not as spectacle alone, but as memory, release, ritual and lived experience.

More information via

Image: Zoe Spowage, Tanked, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 204 x 127cm

10/05/2026

Harry Woodrow,
HCTWJ14, 2026
Acrylic on MDF and wood panel with radiused front and back edges
70 × 70 × 4 cm

Showing in Private Jets
May 7 – June 4, 2026

In HCTWJ14, the whirlpool bath becomes darker, denser and more nocturnal - less lifestyle fantasy than sealed chamber. The black surface absorbs the object’s promise of comfort, while the jets and highlights glint like instruments, studs or small mechanical eyes. Woodrow keeps the absurdity of the motif intact, but here it feels more ominous: engineered pleasure tipped toward something bodily, synthetic and faintly sinister.

View at blackbirdrook.com - link in bio

bath

10/05/2026

Where art is bought - and what those places ask of you.

Most people do not avoid buying contemporary art because they dislike it. They avoid it because the next step feels strangely unclear.

Where do you go? Who speaks first? Is it rude to ask the price? Are you supposed to know what you are looking at before admitting that you like it?

Buying art is not only a financial decision. It is social, psychological and sometimes faintly absurd. Galleries, fairs, auctions, online platforms, advisors, studios - each one asks something different of you. Each has its own codes, rituals, risks and small humiliations.

This piece is for anyone who likes art, follows artists, goes to shows, saves paintings on Instagram, feels the occasional jolt in front of something and then does absolutely nothing about it because the whole business seems designed for people who already know the rules.

The rules are not as mysterious as they look.

Read the full piece on Substack - link in bio.