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Blackbird Rook

@blackbird_rook

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Art-world intelligence and cultural strategy for collectors, artists, estates and organisations.

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Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper is now available from the Blackbird Rook store.

A book on a remarkable body of work made between the early 1980s and mid 1990s - not studies, not footnotes, but some of Hopkins’ quickest, funniest and most formally alive work.

Order at blackbirdrook.com

Link in bio.

#contemporaryart #abstraction #clydehopkins #abstractpainting #painting by @blackbird_rook

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4 months ago

Making good art is not the same as making it as an artist.

Step outside the studio and the ground shifts. The rules are rarely explained, the hierarchies remain invisible until you collide with them and talent, although essential, is never enough.

Outside the Studio: A Field Guide to Being an Artist Today is my attempt to make some of that hidden knowledge explicit.

It draws on nearly twenty years teaching Professional Practice on Fine Art degree programmes, nine years working as an art adviser, curator and dealer and considerably longer experiencing the whole thing from the artist’s side.

Across almost 100 pages, the guide covers portfolios, artist statements, websites, pricing, galleries, studio visits, collectors, grants, open calls, rejection, professional ethics and the long business of keeping a practice alive.

It isn’t a promise of success or a handbook for gaming the art world. It is a practical map of the terrain, including the parts people prefer not to discuss.

The full guide is available to paid subscribers for £5. You’re welcome to subscribe, read it and cancel when you’re finished. Or stay for the two-part Collector’s Guide, the full archive, and all the other paid essays.

Link in @blackbird_rook bio

#OutsideTheStudio #ArtistCareer #ProfessionalPractice #WorkingArtist #ContemporaryArtists by @blackbird_rook

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a month ago

How do you know what art to buy?
Not what’s fashionable, or what has the most persuasive sales pitch attached to it, but what deserves to become part of a collection you’ll be living with for years?
The Collector’s Guide to Contemporary Art is the practical manual I use to answer that question.
It covers the seven tests I apply to a work, how to assess risk, when to move, when to wait and how to think about price once the theatre has been removed.
There are working models for building collections at £25,000, £100,000 and £250,000+, plus detailed artist case studies and the practical records a collector should keep.

The full guide is available to paid Blackbird Rook subscribers, together with the complete archive.

Link in @blackbird_rook bio

#ContemporaryArt #ArtCollecting #ArtCollector #ArtAdvisory #EmergingArtists by @blackbird_rook

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a month ago

Feeling out of your depth is something we all experience. But, when it comes to art, why does it feel like there’s you’re the only one? In his latest column, Greg Rook lifts the veil and explains why the art world can have this effect. Read the article at the link in bio

@blackbird_rook by @blackbird_rook

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2 days ago

A large orange head, a face in bands of black and pink, and smaller shapes that become harder to identify the longer you look. Alex Crocker’s Op draws on the clutter of family life, children’s drawings and stickers attached to bedroom furniture, giving that familiar imagery a stranger, tougher presence through paint.

For this week’s One Piece Worth Seeing, I look at how Crocker holds this crowded painting together, and how much of the humour and tenderness of its starting points survives the transformation.

Read the piece on Blackbird Rook’s Substack. Link in @blackbird_rook bio.

@crockeralex #AlexCrocker #OnePieceWorthSeeing #BlackbirdRook #ContemporaryPainting #Painting ArtWriting Substack by @blackbird_rook

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3 days ago

Sarah Kate Wilson’s Iridophores, 2020. Acrylic, screen-printing inks, wax and water-soluble pastel on panel. A small painting with a lot going on.
I included Sarah’s work in The Hog’s Back at Blackbird Rook in 2024. Her paintings draw on animal camouflage, natural patterns and magical practices, using scratching, rubbing, printing and layering to make surfaces that seem to keep offering up different possibilities.
Iridophores appears in the “Rabbit holes” section of my latest Substack piece, Miranda’s Hitler Moustache. This might seem an improbable connection, although the route from Celebrity Traitors to painting was surprisingly short. The piece is about happy accidents, deliberate decisions and why I can admire a comedian’s possible contrivance while becoming almost irrationally irritated by a contrived paint drip. Sarah’s painting brings me back to the more interesting territory between control and chance: setting processes in motion, seeing what they produce and deciding what to keep. As a painter, I know how easily you can miss the best thing that has happened because you’re still trying to make the thing you originally intended.

You can read the piece on Blackbird Rook’s Substack, via the link in the Blackbird Rook bio.

@blackbird_rook @sarah_kate_wilson #SarahKateWilson #ContemporaryPainting #ContemporaryArt #ArtCollecting #BlackbirdRook by @blackbird_rook

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5 days ago

A studio visit can be a surprisingly loaded thing. The artist may be hoping you buy something. The collector may simply want to look. A curator might be interested, but not in the way the artist imagines. And everyone is trying to work out what everyone else really means.

I’ve been on all sides of it: as an artist hoping to sell, as a fellow artist asked for an opinion, and as an adviser visiting studios on behalf of collectors.
So I’ve written a short practical guide to the studio visit: how to prepare, what to show, how to talk about the work, when to discuss price, what happens if someone wants to buy, what happens if they don’t, and how to follow up afterwards without becoming a nuisance. And perhaps most importantly, how not to mistake warmth, enthusiasm or a good conversation for a commitment.

The Studio Visit, now on my Substack.
https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/the-studio-visit

#ContemporaryArt #ArtCollectors #Artists #ArtAdvisory #ArtMarket by @blackbird_rook

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11 days ago

A painting in storage can have an enviable 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.
For the new Hoyland and Hopkins exhibition, curated by Philip Dodd, I’ve written about the work required to keep their makers in view. I have an interest here: Blackbird Rook represents the Clyde Hopkins Estate. That gives me a reason to ask the question, and you a reason to scrutinise the answer. Who Gets Space?

https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/who-gets-space?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

#ClydeHopkins #JohnHoyland #BritishPainting #AbstractPainting #ArtHistory BlackbirdRook by @blackbird_rook

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14 days ago

Ever been worried that your words could cut you off from the art world? Fear not, critics, because Plaster’s agony aunt is here to calm your nerves. In his latest column, Greg Rook tells you how to walk the fine line between remaining on a gallery’s good side without compromising your criticism. Link in bio.

@blackbird_rook by @blackbird_rook

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16 days ago

At first glance, this looks embroidered. It isn’t. Christina Niederberger’s Woman VI (after de Kooning), 2017, is painted. Niederberger takes the visual language of stitching and needlework, forms of labour traditionally associated with women, and uses it to remake the work of one of the great figures of American abstraction.

Her source here was a charcoal drawing by de Kooning. Smudges, scratches and rapidly drawn marks are enlarged and translated into painstaking painted imitations of stitches. The spontaneity of the original becomes something slow, deliberate and controlled.

That reversal is what makes the painting so interesting. It is funny, critical and affectionate at the same time. You recognise de Kooning, then start noticing how completely Niederberger has changed the terms on which you are looking at him.

Christina Niederberger
Woman VI (after de Kooning), 2017
Oil on canvas
140 × 90 cm

Available through Blackbird Rook. Please get in touch for further images or details.

#ChristinaNiederberger #DeKooning #WillemDeKooning #ContemporaryPainting #BlackbirdRook by @blackbird_rook

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17 days ago

Four paintings I was particularly excited to share with collectors this month. Eric Banks, Hugo Winder-Lind, Christina Niederberger and Dido Hallett are very different painters, but each is thinking seriously about what painting can do now and how it relates to its history and the culture.

The full September Collector’s Note is now on Substack, with the works, prices and some thoughts on what each might bring to a collection.

Link through Substack in the @blackbird_rook bio

https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/a-collectors-note-october?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

#EricBanks #HugoWinderLind #ChristinaNiederberger #DidoHallett #ContemporaryArt @ietbanxy2 @hugowinderlind @christinaniederberger @didohallett10 by @blackbird_rook

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18 days ago

Eric Banks’s small paintings are crowded with forms that might be heads, hands or vessels, built from paper and pigment into surfaces that look patched and repeatedly reworked. In Torah, pale fragments sit within a vivid blue outline. Mask gathers its circles into a dark, uneven mass against green and yellow. In Pressing Matters, the forms jostle, leaving very little room for anyone to get comfortable.
The response from other painters to Banks’ work has been emphatic, and I share their appetite for these awkward, densely worked pictures. There are echoes of Guston and Beckmann for me, particularly where the bodily and the comic become difficult to separate. Banks’s wider concern with tyranny finds a language in these cramped encounters.

Torah, 2022 22.9 × 30.5cm

Mask, 2025 27.9 × 35.6cm

Pressing Matters, 2022 27.9 × 35.6cm

All acrylic/paper fusion with oil on canvas.

If any of these works are of interest, please contact Blackbird Rook by direct message for prices and availability.

#EricBanks #BlackbirdRook #ContemporaryPainting #Painting #ArtCollectors @blackbird_rook @ietbanxy2 by @blackbird_rook

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19 days ago