KURT BEERS IS probably unique amongst owners of commercial art galleries in London because he was once a ‘Mountie’, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His gallery in Little Britain (near the Smithfield meat market and the Barbican) specialises in showcasing contemporary paintings created by up-and-coming artists and those in mid-career. Often, the gallery shows the works of painters, who are not yet well-known, but deserve to become better recognised. Until 23 May 2026, Beers has an exhibition of works by Alice Herbst.
Alice was born in Sweden in 1993. She studied art at the Stockholm School of Fine Art, and then at the Gerlesberg School of Fine Art. Her show at Beers is called “The Whispering Game”, and is a collection of paintings made between 2025 and 2026. As soon as I saw the paintings, I liked them. Excellently executed, well-composed, and intriguing, they are highly original: a breath of fresh air. Without knowing exactly what, I felt that each painting told a story. What that story was intended to be by the artist did not matter because the viewer can make up his or her interpretation of what was being portrayed.
In many of the paintings, masks can be seen, either being worn or just on their own. In a couple of paintings, faces were partially obscured. Why the masks and the hidden faces are so prevalent would make interesting subject matter for a psychologist. Another feature in Alice’s paintings are depictions of paintings within the paintings. For example, in one picture a masked woman seems to be holding a bunch of flowers. After a moment, one can see that it is not a bouquet in her hand but a board with a painting of flowers upon it. In another painting, a still life that includes a vase with flowers, the flowers appear to be a painting of flowers on a board, rather than real flowers. These types of images within images and the profusion of masks make Alice’s paintings more than pretty pictures, and give one cause to wonder.
As with all the shows we have viewed at Beers, Alice’s paintings were well-displayed on the whitewashed walls of the gallery. Though far from the large group of art galleries in Mayfair, Beers deserves regular visits.
DURING A RECENT visit to the Tate Britain art gallery in London, we stopped to view a room that contained paintings of birds. All the paintings except one contained depictions of at least one bird. The exception, in which there was no bird to be seen, was painted by Richard Wilson (1713-1782).
The painting is called “Lake Avernus and the Island of Capri”, and was painted in about 1760. Lake Avernus is near Naples (Napoli). In Roman mythology, it was believed by to be the mouth of Hades, the hellish underworld described in the “Aeneid” by the Roman author Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC). This evil place was believed to emit fumes that killed any birds flying over it.
The name Averna is derived from the Greek word ‘aornos’, which translates as ‘without birds’. Hence the absence of birds in Wilson’s painting.
ONE CANNOT HOPE to enjoy every work of art that is on display. Until 6 September 2026, at the Serpentine South Gallery there is an exhibition of paintings by Cecily Brown, who was born in London in 1960, and studied art at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. She works in New York.
I found Brown’s paintings to be messily composed. Each one looked like paint had been applied without much attention to composition. I might be missing something subtle, but her paintings did not appeal to me.
Well, at least I gave them a chance by viewing them.
WORKS BY COLOMBIAN artist Beatriz Gonzalez (1932-2026) are being exhibited at London’s Barbican art gallery until 10 May 2026. She began studying architecture in the 1950s, but dropped out. Later, she studied fine arts at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, graduating in 1962.
Over the years, Gonzalez produced a wide variety of works, and throughout her life she believed that (to quote her): “Art says things that history cannot”, and what one can see in the exhibition confirms this. She lived through troubled times in Colombia, and this is reflected in many of her artworks. She has been described as a ‘pop artist’ possibly because many of her works were inspired by things she saw in magazines, newspapers, posters, and other media aimed at the public. However, she discounted this description, as can be seen by this answer to the question “Did you ever consider yourself (now or in the past) a pop artist?” during an interview she gave at the Tate Gallery in 2015:
“No, I considered my work a provincial type of painting. I’ve always considered myself more of a painter and within this remit I painted the joy of the underdeveloped. For me the type of art that I was doing could only circulate internationally as a curiosity. Mine was a provincial type of art without horizons, confronting the everyday: art is international.”
I will not attempt to discuss all the works on display at the Barbican, but will confine myself to her paintings on items of furniture, which she commenced in the 1970s. These beautifully executed creations are often quite witty. “The Last Supper” was one of the first of these pieces of furniture repurposed as a work of art. It consists of a fine table on the top of which the artist has painted a simplified version of a renaissance depiction of the Last Supper. And on a wooden coat stand, the mirror has been painted over with Gonzalez’s simplified version of the famous Mona Lisa painting. Another example is a straw basket with a ribbon on its handle. On the inside of the base of this everyday object she has painted a picture of three puppies resting on a floor. There is also a metal cot whose base is painted with a picture of a sleeping child. In the show, there are some televisions with paintings of people covering their screens. By now, you must be getting the idea of this aspect of Gonzalez’s art. My favourite example of this re-use of household items as places to paint pictures is a circular tray on which the artist has depicted Salome carrying the severed head of St John the Baptist on a circular tray.
Apart from the painted furniture and domestic items, the exhibition has a series of sections that show examples of Gonzalez’s art at the various stages in her artistic career. As is often the case at the Barbican art gallery, the artworks are beautifully displayed and well labelled.
THE ARTIST DAVID Hockney (born 1937) had his eighty-eighth birthday in July 2025.Yet age has not stopped him from creating prolifically. Today, 25 February 2026, we visited an exhibition of his work at the Anely Juda Fine Art Gallery in London’s Hanover Square. It is on until 28 February 2026.
The upper gallery on the first floor is a collection of works, moonscapes and nightscapes, that Hockney created on an iPad, and then had printed and framed. I am no lover of Hockney’s iPad creations, and those on display did not excite me. However, in the ground floor galleries, a treat awaited us. On display was a collection of oil paintings, all created by Hockney in 2025. They include several portraits, depictions of interiors with and without people, and a self-portrait in which the artist can be seen painting while seated in a wheelchair. In some of the pictures, instead of painting the view through a door or window, the artist has pasted photographs of what can be seen outside onto the canvas. Each of the paintings displays a joyful love of life and is richly coloured. In addition, Hockney experiments with perspective in some of the paintings, often with pleasantly surprising results.
To summarise, this is an exhibition worth seeing if you happen to be in London during the next few days. Like Picasso, Hockney demonstrates that advancing age need not necessarily curtail artistic expression.
GANJIFA IS A traditional art of decorating playing-cards. Ganjifa cards originated in Persia and spread to India. They can be rectangular but are often circular. Traditionally, the Indian cards were decorated with scenes from the Ramayana.
By Raghupati Bhat
In the 1980s, Indian artist Raghupati Bhat revived the Mysore tradition of ganjifa painting. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a set of his ganjifa cards. Images of these are projected on a wall of Kaash Space, a gallery in Bangalore’s Berlie Street. They form part of a superb exhibition of later works by Bhat, all of which are developments of his earlier ganjifa artworks.
Raghupati Bhat’s drawings and paintings depict mythological stories from the Ramayana. All of them are exquisitely executed and filled with minute details. A set of four painted miniatures are painted with dyes made from natural products, using single hairs from paint brushes to achieve the great detailing within them. In many of his line drawings, Bhat included delicate, beautiful ‘doodles’ in addition to the pictures’ main subjects. All in all, the exhibition includes a fine selection of the artist’s intricately executed creative interpretations of episodes and characters in the Ramayana.
In addition to Bhat’s works, the exhibition includes three other artists’ works: some photographs, some paintings, and two beautiful inlaid wood panels. These other artists’ works were inspired by those of Raghupati Bhat.
This wonderful exhibition continues until 21 December 2025, and should not be missed if you happen to be in Bangalore.
DURING A VISIT to London’s National Gallery, I entered a room in which paintings by JMW Turner (1775-1851) and J Constable (1776-1837) were being displayed.
By Turner in the National Gallery
Seeing these artists’ works together reminded me of a visit to the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Cheshire). I wrote about this place in my book “An Alphabetical Tour of England”, and compared the two artists. Here is what I wrote in my book:
“In one small gallery, … two paintings hang close to each other but are separated by a neo-classical fireplace (an exhibit). One of them is by JMW Turner (1775-1851) and the other by his contemporary and rival J Constable (1776-1837). It is interesting to see them almost side-by-side because it allows the viewer to compare their styles and what they tried to convey in their paintings. The Turner painting depicts “The Falls of the Clyde”, and the Constable depicts “Cottage at Bergholt”. Neither of the paintings, both created in the age before photography, achieves the accuracy of, say, a photograph. Both seem impressionistic, but the effects that the artists were attempting to have on the viewer are entirely different. Turner’s paintings are often far more impressionistic than Constable’s. Although his subject matter is always at least almost discernible, I feel that Turner’s works were created to evoke both the artist’s and the viewer’s psychological and/or emotional reaction(s) to what was being depicted. In contrast, Constable’s painting techniques seem to have been designed to emphasise aspects of the scene he was painting to give the viewer the impression that he or she is looking at the very same view as that which attracted the artist. Constable regarded painting as being a branch of science. In a lecture he gave in 1836, he said:
‘Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, may not landscape painting be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?’
Turner, in his almost abstract paintings such as the one at the Lady Lever, appeared to be wanting to stimulate the viewer’s deepest emotions. In contrast, Constable tried to convey to the viewer what he saw or felt was important in his subject matter. Without resorting to the almost photographic accuracy of, for example, both Canaletto and Vermeer, the two artists, whose paintings hang almost next to each other in the Lady Lever, successfully achieve their aims. For me, the avoidance of detailed accuracy of representation in both Turner’s and Constable’s paintings, enhances the impression of reality in my mind, something that photography cannot do to the same extent.
Even if you do not wish to compare Turner and Constable, I can strongly recommend a visit to the soap maker’s gallery in Port Sunlight …”
Seeing the paintings at the National Gallery reinforced my feelings as expressed above in the excerpt from my book.
THE WRITER CHARLOTTE Bronte (1816-1855) and her sister Emily lived in Brussels from 1842 to 1844. Charlotte’s novel “Villette” (published in 1853) is based on her stay in Belgium’s capital city. In the novel, a young female character, Lucy Snowe, visited a gallery in the city, and noticed a painting that had been set aside to be viewed by connoisseurs. It was described in the story as follows:
“It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude, suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher’s meat—to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids—must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She, had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material—seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery—she managed to make inefficient raiment. … On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore the name ‘Cleopatra.’”
Today, 29 October 2025, we looked at a small exhibition in London’s Bury Street. Presented by a Turkish gallery, Guler & Guler, the show was called “Silks & Sultanas: Courtly Fabrics and Depictions of Women in the Ottoman World”. Mr Cem Güler kindly showed us around his small, but superb exhibition. One of the larger paintings, which depicts a reclining lady, is called “The Almeh” (i.e., The Sultan’s favourite), and was painted by Eduoard de Biefve (1808-1882), a Belgian. It was painted in 1842, the year that the Bronte girls arrived in Brussels. Mr Guler explained that this was the painting that Charlotte described in “Villette”. The description in the extract reproduced above is a good description of what we saw today, but the author added a few details that are not present in the painting.
In December 2023, the painting was auctioned by Sotheby’s in Dallas (USA). The auction house’s website remarked of this painting:
“The present painting met with a tumultuous reception in 1842 largely because of its title. The Arab term Almeh designates a class of educated women who sang and recited poems from behind a screen or from another room during parties or private entertainments. However, the term’s meaning became distorted and for many at that time it was associated with exhibitionist dancers whose suggestive dances had a sexual connotation. L’Almeh by Bièfve is deliberately provocative: languorously reclining on a couch, the woman looks directly at the viewer and points a finger at the mattress. It is hardly surprising that the painting met with such reactions.”
And in “Villette”, after being caught looking at the painting, the young English lady viewing it is told off by Monsieur Paul Emanuel, who clearly thought it an unsuitable picture to be seen by a young lady. And Lucy Snowe did not approve of it, as is related in the following from artdaily.com:
“We may think of our historic and leading creative minds as endlessly progressive, but in 1842, the indelible Charlotte Brontë came face to face with a controversial new painting, a true succès de scandale that by all evidence disturbed and irritated her so badly that she wrote at length about it in her final — and some say her best — novel, Villette. Brontë’s fictional proxy, the main character Lucy Snowe, stares at the painting (and its seductive subject) and thinks: ‘…this picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say … She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case … Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse … it was on the whole an enormous piece of claptrap’.”
We had entered the small gallery to see the exhibition because I wanted to see whether there were any paintings of women dressed in traditional Albanian folk costumes (Albania was part of the Ottoman empire until 1912). There were none, but, instead, I came face to face with a painting that had caught the attention of Charlotte Bronte soon after it was painted.
DURING A VISIT to the Frieze Masters art fair in London’s Regents Park in October 2025, we looked at a collection of Flemish paintings being exhibited by the De Jonckheere Gallery. One of these was “Allegory of Sight: A Collector’s Cabinet with Venus and Cupid”. It was painted in Antwerp between 1601 and 1678 by “Workshop of Jan Brueghel the Younger”. It is an example of several paintings with this title. According to Wikipedia, these artworks:
“… showcases varied objects associated with sight, the arts, and navigation. The painting was heavily influenced by The Five Senses, a series of allegorical paintings done by the younger Brueghel’s father, Jan Brueghel the Elder.”
“…translated as “rooms of art” and are meant to offer a glimpse into the depth and variety of these collections accumulated by the Dutch aristocracy.”
The painting at Frieze contains a gold chandelier that hangs from the ceiling. It is a decorative example, which includes an object that has interested me greatly since I was a teenager. At the top of the chandelier there is a double-headed eagle (‘DHE’). This is a bird with two heads, each on its own neck. In the painting, each of the heads is surmounted by a crown topped with a small cross. My interest in the DHE began when my fascination with Albania, whose flag contains a DHE, began in the mid-1960s. Chandeliers with DHEs appear in several other paintings by members of the Brueghel family (and their studios) in which the subject matter described above was depicted. I asked one of the gallery assistants about the DHE on the chandelier, and she had no idea about it. I was hoping that she would confirm my suspicion that the two-headed bird in the painting was related to the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, both of whose emblems included the DHE.
On returning home, I investigated further, and found a book (available online), “Rubens & Brueghel, A Working Friendship” by Anne T. Woollett and Ariane van Suchtelen. It deals mainly with paintings by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), the father of Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678). In relation to the painting of “Sight” by Brueghel the Elder, it noted:
“It has often been assumed that this costly series of paintings was commissioned by Archdukes Albert and Isabella. Rubens had, after all, held the post of court painter since his return from Italy in 1 6 0 8, and Brueghel regularly worked for the court at Brussels. The couple’s palaces serve as background scenery in three of the five depictions, and Sight contains a double portrait of the regents and an equestrian portrait of Albert, as well as a brass chandelier crowned with the Habsburgs’ double-headed eagle.”
This being the case and because Brueghel’s son (and his workshop) would have been influenced by his father’s art, it is perhaps unsurprising to see the DHE on the chandelier in the painting we viewed at Frieze.
RACHEL JONES IS an artist who was born in London in 1991. She trained at Glasgow School of Art, then at the Royal Academy Schools. There is an exhibition of her paintings, “Gated Canyons”, at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 October 2025. I must admit I had never heard of her before visiting the show in August 2025. So, I went to see it without knowing what to expect.
Rachel’s colourful paintings on display vary in size and shape. All of them are more abstract than figurative, but not completely abstract. The artist uses colours well, producing appealing images. Many of them interested me as a retired dentist because most of what was on display included somewhat abstract depictions of jawbones, teeth, lips, and tongues. The artist regards the mouth as being important as it is a portal through which we interact with the outside world, express our feelings, and explore psychological landscapes. If I understand it correctly, Rachel regards the mouth as a gateway to both our inner selves and the outside world. Having read the informative labels that tell viewers about her work, I began seeing, or even imagining, elements of her paintings that might be interpreted as features of oral anatomy.
The exhibition occupies three rooms, one of which I felt was too small to properly view the three large pictures within it. Otherwise, the paintings were nicely displayed and well-lit. I am glad I saw the show, but I would be reluctant to recommend it to most people I know.
yamey 