Neja's Art Walks

16/10/2026

Italian painter, Massimo Giannoni, documents the depositories of learning. The book shop, library and museum are his subjects. Serried ranks and columns of multi coloured volumes, folios and manuscripts both line and define the walls of their architectural enclosures. Bookshelves create a space within a space, a capsule of text, diagram and illustration that enfolds any potential occupant with a boundless variety of entertainment and information.
Giannoni works in oil, thickly rendered and worked into turbid, glutinous descriptions of the books, architecture, and objects of his world. His paint is clotted and sticky, richly applied and slathered on to make an impasto of sensuous immediacy. The handling of the brush is deft and assertive, which makes for a lively, agitated surface or ‘facture’. Colour ranges across the spectrum – his is not a monochromatic palette, despite sometimes-shadowy interiors. Illumination is by a diffuse light, that subtly articulates and discloses each mis-en-scene, establishing a hermetic and numinous atmosphere that verges on the sacred.

These images suggest the scholarship and enlightenment that arises from sites of study and revelation. They are, however, entirely unpopulated; the client is absent; the people have left or have not yet arrived. What we see is a resource untapped, ignored or possibly abandoned. Melancholy attaches itself to empty spaces. Nevertheless, we sense a presence from the voices of the books themselves – a constant murmuring, an undertow of discourse which is intrinsic to the learned object.

We can choose to experience these pictures as depictions of cultural decay or, on the other hand, as a hard-won inheritance ripe for exploration. In a post-modern world that devalues and discards the intellectual achievements of its past, Giannoni’s paintings invite us to take up the book, view the museum and immerse ourselves in the life of the mind, wherever it may lead us.

To book our Mayfair art walk, please do get in touch.

15/10/2026

In 1972, Tate bought Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, made from 120 ordinary firebricks, for £2,297. The work had been exhibited without much controversy, but in 1976 a Sunday Times article brought the purchase to public attention, and the press reaction was enormous — more than 1,000 articles followed, criticising the Tate for spending public money on what appeared to be a pile of bricks.

The controversy became a wider debate about public funding of contemporary art. Critics attacked the work and the Tate defended its importance as Minimalist art. On 23 February 1976, a visitor even threw blue vegetable dye over the bricks, although it was successfully washed off. The Tate then had to think about obtaining replacement bricks because the particular type mattered to the work. Equivalent VIII was one of eight different arrangements Andre made from the same 120 bricks, which he considered equivalent because they had the same material, weight and volume.

Ana Mendieta, Andre’s former wife and fellow artist, is currently the subject of a major exhibition there, running until 17 January 2027. Mendieta’s work is radically different, exploring the body, nature, identity and displacement through photography, film, performance and ephemeral interventions in the landscape.

If you’d like to discover her work with a bit more context, get in touch to book a guided art walk with me at Tate Modern.

14/10/2026

After years of admiring Salman Toor’s work, mostly online and through books, but occasionally encountering his paintings in person, I finally got to see his marvellous exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.

Across two rooms filled with his signature green hues, one painting in particular stood out: Cross Street.

The painting grew out of a scene Toor glimpsed through the window of Tayyabs, a restaurant in Whitechapel that he frequented. A group of muscular skaters hang around a street sign as a mullah passes by. Toor was struck by the proximity of these two very different kinds of masculinity — both of which had intimidated him growing up.

As a long-term resident of the borough, I know this street and Tayyabs all too well myself, which made encountering this painting particularly special.

Toor’s relationship with London is deeply personal, too. In the early 2000s, visits to friends meant nights out in Soho, gay clubs, and kebabs before catching a night bus back to Streatham. As he puts it, London was a city that opened him up to gay nightlife and art history.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You is at the Courtauld, London, until 10 January

13/10/2026

Would love to hear tour thoughts on this:

Was modernism progress? Why do we embrace so many ugly things now, ...

12/10/2026

I was so irked when I saw Renoir's The Large Bathers hanging in complete isolation at the end of the Renoir and Love exhibition. It felt massive, bizarrely flesh-toned, and totally out of place compared to his exquisite flower bouquets in a theatre box, quick, blurry sketches of couples, or serene river views. It made me wonder how on earth a giant painting of three naked young women could possibly be considered a groundbreaking masterpiece.

The secret is that the painting was meant to shock, marking the exact moment Renoir rebelled against his own style. He had grown totally sick of Impressionism’s blurry, fleeting light effects and wanted to prove he could paint with the structure and permanence of the Old Masters. So, he spent three intense years drawing strict outlines and making the bodies look like solid, heavy marble sculptures—a complete U-turn that absolutely horrified his contemporary artist friends, who thought he had lost his mind.

But that weird, flat, sculptural quality is exactly why art history is obsessed with it. By stripping away realistic depth and focusing purely on exaggerated body shapes, Renoir accidentally handed a blueprint to the next generation of artists. Future giants like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse saw this exact painting and used its blocky, distorted figures as the inspiration to invent Cubism and modern abstract art. So while it looked incredibly strange and jarring at the end of the gallery, I was actually looking at the exact, uncomfortable bridge where 19th-century pretty painting turned into radical 20th-century modern art.

09/10/2026

"Tate Britain’s celebration of the decade, curated by former Vogue supremo Edward Enninful, is one long magazine spread after another. The 90s never looked so tired." OUCH.

Tate Britain’s celebration of the decade, curated by former Vogue supremo Edward Enninful, is one long magazine spread after another. The 90s never looked so tired

08/10/2026

Catherine Murphy (b. 1946, Cambridge, Massachusetts) is a highly influential American realist painter and draughts woman, renowned for transforming ordinary, everyday subjects into complex visual narratives. Rejecting the standard labels of photorealism or surrealism, Murphy describes herself as an “observational painter” who works directly from what she sees, rather than using photographic references.

Her slow, meticulous process means that individual works can take months or even years to complete. Familiar household objects and intimate domestic spaces are rendered with such extraordinary clarity that they can begin to feel almost uncanny.

You can discover Catherine Murphy’s work as part of my Mayfair & St James’s Art Walk. If you’d like to join me, get in touch to book your walk — I’d love to show you some of the fascinating galleries and exhibitions in these two historic art districts of London.

07/10/2026

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Place Clichy (c. 1880) captures what it feels like to lock eyes onto one person in a thick crowd.

While permanently owned by The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, this Impressionist masterpiece is currently on display at The National Gallery, London for the blockbuster exhibition, Renoir and Love. Acting like a camera lens, the painting keeps the fashionable woman in the front sharply detailed while the busy Parisian street behind her—complete with horse-drawn carriages and top hats—melts into a soft blur.

There are two hidden artistic influences here. While the out-of-focus background mimics early photography, the steep, angled perspective was inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which were highly popular in Paris at the time.
Although it looks like a quick street snapshot, Renoir actually painted it inside his studio at the nearby Place Saint-Georges. Because the background is so heavily stylized and abstract, it has no clear landmarks; the name La Place Clichy wasn’t given to the painting until 1900.

Its journey to the UK started in 1924 when it was bought by British art collector Samuel Courtauld. His family later loaned it to Cambridge, but it almost left the country in 1986 when it went up for sale. To keep it on public display, a huge fundraising campaign gathered £645,000 from national heritage funds, private donors, and ten Cambridge colleges to buy it permanently.

To book our guided art walk of this exhibition, or any other art walk, do get in touch.

04/10/2026

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) was one of the most important Swiss artists of the turn of the 20th century, and a fascinating bridge between 19th-century painting and modernism. Born in Bern into poverty, he lost his parents and several siblings to tuberculosis while still young. He eventually moved to Geneva, where he studied under Barthélemy Menn and gradually evolved from a painter of Alpine landscapes into one of Europe’s leading Symbolists.

Hodler created a highly distinctive visual language based on symmetry, rhythm and repetition, which he called “parallelism”. His figures often appear in carefully balanced arrangements, while his landscapes reduce mountains, lakes and skies to powerful, almost abstract patterns of colour and line. Death, sleep, love and the human condition were recurring themes, alongside the monumental landscapes of the Swiss Alps. His painting The Night (1890) caused controversy because of its n**e figures, but also helped establish his international reputation within the Symbolist movement.

By the early 20th century, Hodler had become an internationally recognised artist, exhibiting with the Berlin, Munich and Vienna Secessions alongside some of the most progressive artists of his time. His work was admired by artists including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, while his increasingly simplified forms and rhythmic compositions anticipated aspects of modernism.

We are lucky to have one of Hodler’s paintings currently on display at the National Gallery in London. If you’d like to discover Hodler and other fascinating artists in person, get in touch to book one of our art walks.

01/10/2026

Today turned into one of those wonderfully serendipitous art days where one thing unexpectedly leads to another — and suddenly you’ve spent hours happily disappearing down a rabbit hole. 😄

It started with some voice messages from a friend in Berlin about the Pre-Raphaelites. Somewhere in the conversation, May Morris came up. We initially thought she was William Morris’s sister, before realising that she was actually his daughter — and I then remembered that I had seen one of her pieces at Rudyard Kipling’s house in Sussex.

That was enough to send me down the May Morris rabbit hole. I ended up reading about her work, her jewellery, her life and her relationship with Mary Lobb, and discovering all sorts of things I hadn’t known before.

And then, naturally, another discovery: I found an exhibition in Madrid, Women Artists: Pathways through Pre-Raphaelitism, which I can actually see during my Christmas trip.

And because apparently one rabbit hole wasn’t enough, I then discovered an exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE about Hans Prinzhorn — someone I happened to read a book about last year.

This is exactly why I love art research. One tiny conversation can lead you somewhere completely unexpected, and before you know it you have another exhibition added to your travel itinerary and a whole new list of things you want to investigate. 😂
Beautiful serendipity days like this are honestly one of my favourite things. ❤️