The last two years have sparked a dramatic rise in the number of people experiencing mental health problems, with 1.6 million waiting for specialised treatment and another 8 million who cannot get on the waiting list but would benefit from support (Guardian 2022). Hospital Rooms are trying to fulfil the need to create engaging and dignified spaces where service users can receive treatment has therefore only grown.

In support of Hospital Rooms, this August, Queen’s will be installing artwork by Mark Titchner at Hauser & Wirth London as part of the exhibition “Hospital Rooms. Like there is hope and I can dream of another world” (19 August – 14 September).

The exhibition, which is free and open to all from Friday 19 August, will culminate in a fundraising auction hosted by Bonhams and will share ambitious new artworks that have been created in collaboration with service users such as Julia Foxon; who has lived experience of mental health services.

The exhibition will include a 15-metre-long text-based painting that reads ‘Like there is hope and I can dream of another world’ – a phrase inspired by Julia’s response to the question, ‘How should an artwork in a mental health hospital make you feel?’

After the exhibition, Queen’s will continue to support Hospital Rooms by installing the Mark Titchner artwork at the Rivers Centre, a new-build mental health unit at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, which provides care to people with severe and enduring mental health diagnosis.

To find out more about Hospital Rooms or to offer your support, please visit  www.hospital-rooms.com

In support of Hospital Rooms, Queen’s recently had the pleasure of installing a 15 metre long, text-based painting by Mark Titchner. The work, which forms part of the major new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, ‘Like there is hope and I can dream of another world’ is on from today through 14 September.

The piece, which will later be installed at the newly built mental health unit at the Rivers Centre in Norwich, is formed of 51 wooden panels and was painted on-site by artist Mark Titchner and a team of volunteers from COAT paint, Colart and Hospital Rooms. Creating the work on wooden panels has also meant that, unlike a mural, the work can be moved and repurposed as required.

In addition to this artwork by Mark Titchner, the exhibition also includes new artworks by Harold Offeh and Michelle Williams Gamaker that have been created in collaboration with people with lived experience of mental health services.

The exhibition will conclude with Hospital Rooms’ fourth annual auction on 14 September at Hauser & Wirth London, generating significant funds for a new art programme and series of artworks at the Rivers Centre, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. Works have been donated by artists including Amy Sherald, Chantal Joffe, Pipilotti Rist and Thomas J Price. Online bidding is open to all at Bonhams.com from 8 September.

To find out more about Hospital Rooms or to offer your support visit  www.hospital-rooms.com

The show presents a collection of recent works by upcoming contemporary artist Raghav Babbar.

Watch the above video to go behind the scenes with us and explore the exhibition installation.

We transported, unpacked, and installed this emotive collection of portraits, which opens to the public this evening (1 June), timed to coincide with London Gallery Weekend.

Established in 2016 by Joseph Nahmad, the gallery hosts a range of modern and contemporary projects in its historic London, Cork Street space.

‘Raghav Babbar: New Paintings’, presents an intensely personal and evocative body of work. Through his skilled and patient application of oil paint, Babbar creates captivating textures and compositions. His paintings are a testament to his meticulous layering, a process that requires both time and an unwavering dedication to building up each stroke with a rich and vibrant palette.

Babbar renders a profound connection with his subjects through his work. Drawing inspiration from friends, family, and everyday individuals living their lives within India’s diverse society, he captures their emotional depth with empathy and sensitivity.

We’re delighted to have helped bring this vibrant exhibition to life.

ArtCurious is a podcast about “the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history,” and is an entertaining and educational look into art history as you’ve never seen it. Revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world’s great artists and masterpieces, this podcast – and its accompanying book of the same name, published in 2020 by Penguin Books – aims to smash expectations and assumptions about art that are held by aficionados and laypersons alike. Even for our most informed clients, ArtCurious will still most likely surprise you with episodes analysing and exploring the fact the CIA funnelled money to support Abstract Expressionism as a way to fight the Cold War, for example.

Interested to bring such an element of curiosity to our spotlights, we asked Jennifer what her favourite story that she uncovered on the podcast recently was. This was her answer.

One of my favourite art history tales involves the death of the much-beloved artist Vincent van Gogh. And his death – by suicide in July 1890 in the French town of Auvers-Sur-Oise – is as much a part of his story as the famous tale of his cut-off ear is. He’s been called the perfect embodiment of the tortured genius, a creature so agonized by life and failure that he sought his own death as the only solution. But in 2011, two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors published a book titled Van Gogh: The Life that stunned the art world. In their book, authors Gregory White Smith and Stephen Naifeh state that the artist didn’t actually commit suicide. No – they say, he was actually murdered.

Smith and Naifeh spent more than ten years researching and writing Van Gogh: The Life, which they intended to become the definitive biography of Vincent Van Gogh. During their research period, they were given rare access to the archival vaults of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which held everything from the artist’s preparatory sketches to hundreds of his handwritten letters. While sorting methodically through this treasure trove of information, the authors noticed strange or conflicting information in the various reports of the artist’s suicide, which caused them to pause: the artist’s supposed last letter to his brother, posted the day of his death, told of his hopeful future (and of a large purchase of paints just ordered at his Parisian art supplier); all early firsthand accounts of Vincent’s death referred to the event as Vincent having “wounded himself” or as an “accident” – with no one ever discussing or considering suicide as a potential outcome; and that all of Van Gogh’s painting supplies – left in the field in which he had supposedly been painting the afternoon he shot himself – had mysteriously disappeared, as did the gun that Van Gogh was said to have used. All of this doesn’t seem too suspicious to me upon the first read, but it planted in Smith and Naifeh a seed of conspiratorial doubt.

It seemed, they reckoned, that perhaps Van Gogh didn’t intend to kill himself at all and that a tall tale about suicide became the accepted narrative. To Smith and Naifeh, there was little in the way of hard evidence to support the long-assumed tale of Van Gogh’s suicide: no eyewitnesses to the actual shooting, no literal smoking gun, no firmly identified location of the terrible occurrence. It occurred to the authors that the story bordered more on legend than truth. Could it all be a falsehood, a tall tale? Smith and Naifeh wondered, though they kept their hypothesis to themselves.

And then the most bizarre thing happened. Their hypothesis gained credence with the discovery of another supposed firsthand account of Vincent Van Gogh’s death that had mysteriously been overlooked or forgotten for many years. In 1956, a frail man in his eighties named René Secrétan stepped forward to give a series of interviews to a French journalist, claiming to have a firsthand recollection of the famous Vincent van Gogh. René Secrétan grew up in a prosperous Parisian family, and every summer the whole Secrétan crew would decamp to Auvers-Sur-Oise to enjoy their vacation villa.

In 1890, René was a troublemaking sixteen-year-old, who spent his time hunting, fishing, and generally causing all kinds of outdoorsy mischief with a group of like-minded Auvers pals. Their hero was Buffalo Bill Cody,  the American hunter and showman whose Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had performed to massive sold-out crowds in Paris just the year before, during 1889’s Exposition Universelle. René Secrétan saw the Wild West show and fell utterly under the spell of all things cowboy. When his family moved to Auvers for the summer of 1890, René brought with him a much-prized costume consisting of a buckskin tunic, boots, and a cowboy hat, all purchased at great expense in Paris. But he felt the need to add a little more authenticity to his getup, so he supplemented it with one additional element: a 38-calibre pistol, which, according to René, was a real gun, but one that worked erratically. He used it to shoot birds and squirrels in the countryside, but it also did double-duty as a fairly convincing intimidation apparatus. You see, René wasn’t the nicest child in town. In fact, some of his favourite activities were to play pranks on the locals and to cause mayhem throughout the countryside. And in the summer of 1890, there was one particular person whom he especially enjoyed terrorizing. I’ll give you one guess who it was.

There’s so much more to share about this story– about the Secrétan family, René’s bullying ways, and Vincent van Gogh’s own “spin” on the injury that would take his life–all of which might lead you to consider Van Gogh’s life and artworks in an all-new way.  

Interested to find out more? Tune in to ArtCurious and decide for yourself what really happened.

Need help with an up and coming shipment? You can contact the team at info@queensfineart.com. We usually aim to respond within 30 minutes.

Alice has been a registrar for the past eight years and is currently four years into her role at Victoria Miro, where she manages their loans programme. If that wasn’t enough, Alice also liaises directly with around 15 artists and works closely on their customs records as well as working on client services and art fair arrangements with the rest of the Victoria Miro team. But it doesn’t stop there.

Interested to find out how being a registrar has changed during the pandemic and how Victoria Miro is working to become more environmentally friendly, we asked Alice a few questions. First up;

What does an ‘average’ day look like for you as a Senior Registrar in one of London’s top galleries?

Aside from working from home for the past year, my regular routine will involve checking on various timely shipments, ensuring all internal records and paperwork are updated for our loans programme, our artists and our clients. Video meetings with different teams are scheduled throughout the week, alongside reviews of longer ranging projects for storage, customs and condition checking of artworks. I work closely with our exhibitions, technical and sales teams on a daily basis.

How is Victoria Miro working to be more environmentally friendly?

We are increasingly aware of our environmental impact internally and with external suppliers, and this recent focus on sustainability is starting to inform our decisions.

Internally, we implement measures to reduce our carbon footprint by organising a weekly shuttle truck between the gallery and London storage locations alongside minimising singular shipments and using shared sea containers where possible, which has the added benefit of reducing costs for all involved.

We recycle and reuse most soft materials where possible, rarely using those that can’t be recycled for packing. Supplier information is shared between contacts within the industry to further our collective knowledge. The gallery has also invested in ROKBOX reusable cases which we aim to utilise where possible during regular transit movements.

From an operations perspective, our front-of-house is already paperless, and we are encouraged within the offices to follow suit (this has certainly been easier to implement since working from home). We also understand our responsibility to purchase eco-friendly and biodegradable supplies and support local environmentally conscious businesses where possible. A bike-to-work scheme is offered to all staff, as well as other incentives to support green methods of commuting. The gallery is also directly part of various ecosystems given its unique location alongside an east end wharf – the safeguarding of the local moorhen and swan population is of paramount interest to the gallery as a whole!

We have also engaged in conversations over the years with external fine art agents, to understand how we might integrate their current and future aims for their facilities and supply chains, in terms of recycling materials, renewable energy systems and in-house waste-reducing innovations, with our own. We have raised the future prospect of carbon offsetting options and plans for hybrid/electric vehicles, and also discussed how to raise more awareness of these and existing sustainable options with the public and their client base, since these developments need to be made transparent to increase uptake, which is to the benefit of all.

Finally, since the beginning of the pandemic, the gallery has channelled energy into a variety of well-received online art fair presentations and virtual reality exhibitions, which by nature have a low carbon footprint considering the minimal shipping preparations involved. This has been a very engaging new activity that the gallery aims to continue sharing with visitors in various iterations alongside physical shows in future.

Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW Courtesy Victoria Miro (Photograph © James Morris)

What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve had to overcome recently and how did you do so?

Arranging regular consolidated shipments has been logistically complicated during the pandemic and post Brexit when dealing with customs delays, volatile shipping rates, tight deadlines and artist and client requirements, which we treat with utmost care. Additionally, the shifting loan schedules and amending of paperwork due to the pandemic has been particularly trying! However, we have worked closely to ensure logistics run as smoothly as possible.

Ultimately, progress can be challenging when it comes to changing our ingrained habits within the industry – multiple factors must be discussed and confronted, which can be uncomfortable. And yet growing support, sustained engagement and gradual action will benefit the arts as a whole. Though it’s hard for any one organisation to control the level and speed at which change happens, I’m never in doubt of the importance of taking action where possible, however large or small.

If you would like to know more about how we at Queen’s are working to reduce our Carbon Footprint, you can view our Carbon Plan here. For shipping, storage or installation requests, your Queen’s contact remains at your disposal. Alternatively, please contact info@queensfineart.com

As we continue our spotlight series, we speak with MASSIMO DE CARLO Registrar, Margherita Divari, to see how the gallery, with four locations internationally, has adapted since the outbreak of Covid-19.

Plowden & Smith are a large multi-disciplinary conservation and restoration studio based in Mitcham, South London. Their specialist restoration departments include Furniture, Paintings, Paper, Contemporary Art, Sculpture, Ceramics, Stone, Metal, Gilded, and Decorative Surfaces; as well as offering bespoke picture framing and object mounting services. Much like at Queen’s, their clients include private individuals, museums, galleries, fine art shippers, and auction houses.

To find out a little more, we asked a few questions. First up;

What process do you take when restoring a client’s work? Do clients ever ask you to get creative (brightening the sky, making facial features smaller, etc)?

All our painting restoration treatments are created around the specific requirements of each individual painting and are preceded by discreet testing. As no two paintings are the same, it could be said that no two painting restoration treatments are ever really the same. That said, regardless of the specific treatment being carried out, our painting conservators adhere to industry-recognised guidelines laid down by the European Confederation of Conservator-Restorers’ Organisations (E.C.C.O.) Our team works in a way that preserves the artist’s original intent, which is of critical importance, particularly when treating a work by a contemporary or living artist. Sometimes clients do want us to make historic items look brand new, for instance by completely re-gilding a piece of furniture. When the gilding is original and has a nice mellow look, we suggest they avoid regilding as it could potentially devalue the piece.

If you could only select one piece that you’ve restored recently, which would be your favourite?

Over the past few years, we have restored several bronze, Marc Quinn, Sphinx (Caryatid) editions, which was certainly enjoyable. The works are in a variety of finishes and typically require surface cleaning and retouching of minor abrasions. Although it’s always important to use an experienced art handler, such as Queen’s, to move such items, when dealing with valuable artworks or objects that are intrinsically more at risk (because of the design, materials, or methods of construction) this becomes even more important.

With sustainability continuing to be a hot topic (and rightly so!), how has Plowden and Smith adapted to become more sustainable?

Sustainability is certainly a huge topic for the art world, and as members of the Gallery Climate Coalition, one we take seriously. One of the great things about moving to our new state-of-the-art premises at the end of 2018, was the opportunity it gave us to operate in a far more sustainable way than if we had remained in our previous 19th Century building. For example, our new studios are lit by fully dimmable, low energy colour-corrected LED lighting; specialist equipment in individual departments also feature low energy colour-corrected LED lighting, and we use motion sensors throughout the building to ensure lights are only ever on when they are needed.

However, our bricks-and-mortar studio is only one aspect of operating more sustainably. Where possible, we source materials from sustainable and local sources; and over the years we have made various changes to help us reduce our company carbon footprint: using bamboo swab sticks as opposed to plastic swab sticks; starting to work with carbon-neutral delivery companies, and we are also currently trialing recyclable nitrile gloves.

For more information about Plowden & Smith’s restoration, picture framing and independent condition reporting services, please visit www.plowden-smith.com

If you require assistance with shipping, installing or storing your art? Your Queen’s contact remains at your disposal. Alternatively, you can contact the expert team at info@queensfineart.com and we’d be happy to assist.

Views is a London-based inventory management startup looking to help save dealers time and do more deals. We recently partnered with them to make requesting shipping estimates for their users easier. With this in mind, we thought it would be useful to spotlight the new art startup by asking Views co-founder Jamie Gourlay a few questions.

Firstly, it’s great to be working with you to make requesting shipping requests much easier for Views users. Could you outline how the button works?

Sure. It’s pretty simple! Users select works they want to ship, hit ‘Ship’, input the collection and delivery address and a little more, and off the request goes to yourselves at Queen’s who will then revert back with a quote as quickly as possible. Depending on the route, this can be within a little as 30 minutes.

And what inspired you to create Views?

Two big frustrations.

Firstly, the lack of a really excellent mobile inventory system has frustrated me for a while (I’ve been an art advisor for a few years so have felt the pain!) There are loads of good web-based systems, but the accompanying mobile apps are generally less good, meaning it’s hard to pull works up when you’re sitting with a client and desperately need to. The mobile apps don’t meet the standards set by Instagram and WhatsApp and are just hard to use. Loads of galleries will have one system for web and another for mobile, which causes a load of headaches.

Secondly, it’s constantly got to me how art deals so often rely on chance conversations. I was talking to a friend at a big gallery the other day who was telling me she had been looking for Picasso Musketeer for a client earlier in the year. She found out after months of looking that her best friend in the industry (who actually worked for the same gallery!) had a client looking to sell one. She ended up getting a deal done, but it could easily have not happened, and more often than not it wouldn’t have. Information just doesn’t flow.

There are legitimate reasons for this – it’s crucial artworks don’t circulate and get over-exposed. We’re working to make it easier for dealers to identify these opportunities without the artworks in question getting over-exposed.

There are many inventory systems out there, how is Views different?

We’re working on creating an experience as easy as WhatsApp, and as visually beautiful as Instagram. Most dealers don’t even bother trying to log into their inventory management system on their phone because they’re complicated and hard to use. This often results in poor sales assistants finding themselves making emergency PDFs at 11pm at night. Views saves both the dealer and the assistant a load of time: a dealer can access everything they have access to and PDF it up quicker than it takes to text her assistant. The assistant’s evening goes uninterrupted altogether.

Views also has a Requests feature that lets you log client requests. Any relevant artworks in your inventory immediately show up, making it easier to come up with ideas of things to suggest to clients.

How easy is it to transfer from existing inventory systems?

Easy! We offer functionality to import your works from most popular existing inventory systems. We also offer a confidential free white glove data migration service if you need help.

Privacy and security is obviously something we have to take extremely seriously at Queen’s and I presume it’s the same with Views. What measures do you take to ensure your systems are bulletproof?

Customer privacy and security is basically our number one focus, to the point we hired a cyber security expert to our founding team to ensure we’re completely watertight. His previous role was implementing security systems for a prestigious online bank. We’re encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest and we literally have banking-level security, so we’re taking it seriously.

It’s naturally essential that our customers’ inventory is only accessible to them and no one else, and we recognise that their business and livelihoods depend on this being the case and take every possible measure to make it so. We’re confident we’re at least as secure as our most secure competitor in this respect. Our privacy policy is here, if of further interest.

How can someone interested in signing up to Views get started?

To get the app go to www.views.art and hit ‘GET VIEWS’ (or alternatively you can just click here). We ask people to just fill in a quick form so we can find out a bit about them and make sure Views is for them.

If you require assistance with shipping, installing or storing your art? Your Queen’s contact remains at your disposal. Alternatively, you can contact the expert team at info@queensfineart.com and we’d be happy to assist.

For our clients who are less familiar with Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham Contemporary is an international center of contemporary art with a strong sense of local purpose. Since opening in 2009, they have held more than 60 exhibitions, with over 2 million visitors to date, presenting innovative and interwoven programmes of international exhibitions, learning, partnerships, and research. And if that wasn’t enough, they were shortlisted for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2019.

We caught up with their Head of Exhibitions, Kiera Blakey, to find out a little more about the exhibition, where the idea for the exhibition came from, and what visitors can expect. First up, we asked:

We’re really looking forward to seeing the exhibition open on the 20th of November, but where did the idea for the exhibition originally come from?

Our Silver City, 2094 is imagined as a journey that unfolds across four galleries, orientated to the cardinal points. It traces a route from change to understanding, from inner knowledge to wisdom. Along the way, we encounter a selection of artifacts, remnants, and artworks connecting the long 21st century with what went before. Every exhibition asks us to travel in time, but this one insists upon it. This exhibition asks: How might visual culture be produced, displayed, and experienced in the future? Who were ‘we’ before we became ‘we’? Where are we going now? And how might we get there?

How did you choose the artists to participate in the exhibition and are there any new and noteworthy commissions that we should keep an eye out for?

Our Silver City, 2094 is based on a methodology created by Prem Krishnamurthy; the exhibition takes the form of a speculative fiction, or a process of collaborative world-building. It has been developed over the last two years by artists – Céline Condorelli, Femke Herregraven, Grace Ndiritu – and the novelist Liz Jensen, working in dialogue with Krishnamurthy and the Nottingham Contemporary team.

Its language and texture draw upon conversations across Nottingham, with school children, climate scientists, and geographers. The project also extends throughout our building and into the city via a program developed with young people. There are almost 100 artworks, artifacts and three new major multi-disciplinary commissions by Céline Condorelli, Femke Herregraven, Grace Ndiritu.

Céline Condorelli, Dos Años de Vacaciones (Two Years’ Vacation). Exhibition view, TEA Tenerife, 2021. Photograph Sergio Acosta.

Why did you decide to partner with Queen’s on this initiative?

You reached out to us first and despite having relationships with many other transportation companies we remembered you because you had such a personal touch. After our first meeting we knew right away we wanted to build a working relationship, you helped us problem solve, made an effort to get to know us personally and we felt supported beyond just a transaction! You’ve assisted us with the logistics and movement of over 52 works of varying sizes for the exhibition from over 20 different locations, so it’s great to be working so closely with a team that we can trust for our latest exhibition installation.

Are there any outputs that you’d like to come from such an innovative exhibition?

We hope it will start a dialogue about who are spaces for and the civic role of institutions. Along with yourselves, we’re working on a new green exhibition guide; and we want to empower the young people in our city by providing space and opportunities for them to meaningfully participate and connect to the many components of the exhibition.

Where can our clients find out more if they’d like to attend?

The exhibition opens on the 20th November through to the 18th of April. If you’d like to visit us or find out more information, all the details on the exhibition can be found on our website, here.

For exhibition installation, storage, or shipping requests, your Queen’s contact remains at your disposal. Alternatively, please contact info@queensfineart.com