An art dealers notes for surviving this urban metropolis:

1. never trust a man who criticises his wife when she's not there
2. never wear heels on public transport
3. when in an art gallery try to engage with the art first and the marketing bumph second.

The only problem I’ve so far identified with working from home and having other people working from my home, is that I can no longer revel in the life of a domestic sloven.

I can’t leave my dirty knickers on the bathroom floor. I can’t leave last week’s supper on a plate under the sofa and I can’t not get the hoover out for six months of the year.

Yvette’s a whiz in the kitchen. I am not. Last week she was very sweetly helping me make supper for a friend I’d invited round in a moment of domestic optimism. Something bordering on the right side of edible was expected from the kitchen of Knowles. Mild consternation at the absence of a casserole dish was exacerbated by the absence of any sort of oven to table ware whatsoever.
“Not to worry,” Yvette chirps, “we can use the baking tray from the oven.”
Ah yes, good-oh. Rescued from the brink of disaster.
Then the humiliation of the politely disguised horror of another at the sight of my baking tray encrusted with a year and a half’s worth of melted cheese from my staple diet of cheese on toast - or welsh rabbit as I like to call it when I have guests! In a fit of uncharacteristic embarrassment I set to on the baking tray with the elbow grease.
“You can get something for that you know” said Yvette, “you spray it on and leave it over night and in the morning you just wipe it off.”
“oh yes” said I, rather too cheerily, “what’s that called?”
“errr, oven cleaner.”
“right.”

So, what excuse for this extraordinary absence of domestic know-how? How can this monstrous abhorrence be explained? I suppose I could put it down to my own profound laziness. Or I could do what I normally do in such situations and blame it on someone else: well, you know, when you go to boarding school from the age of seven how can you be expected to know about things like oven cleaner? They don’t teach you about oven cleaner at boarding school you know. They teach you about things like crop rotation and the square of the hypotenuse. Not about oven cleaner for goodness sake.

“Not a penny wasted on that education of yours,” as my old man is fond to jest.

Goodness knows why one decides to become a domestic sloven. Turning away from something I suppose. Deciding one doesn’t want to be whatever it is one associates with domesticity. Quite limited associations probably, but then personal associations are never wrong per say, they’re just idiosyncratic. The difficulty comes in being able to see them for what they are rather than assuming them to have some sort of inherence. But once you’ve spotted one of these funny little kinks, these sometimes unhelpful idiosyncrasies that we call personality traits, what are you supposed to do then? Judge it as good or bad and then attempt to delete it or not as appropriate? Or just look at it? And if you just look at it for long enough will it eventually change all by itself? Lord knows. I’m reminded - and cheered - by a verse from the Tao.

“A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.”

It’s all very well Michael, telling us to “make that change”, and I appreciate the sentiment, but is it, in fact, a realistic expectation? Is it possible, or even desirable, to attempt to change? Do we have quite the degree of agency we like to suppose? And if I knew the answers to all of these questions, what would I do then? And why is a tune that didn’t even make it into the top 20 in the UK in 1988 the tune we appear to have chosen to commemorate the King of Pop upon his death in 2009? Why not a more obvious choice: Billie Jean, Thriller, ABC, I Want You Back? That seems odd to me. Do you think we are all, as a nation, as a collective consciousness, in the post 9/11, post-credit crunch, post-post-modern, austerity chic noughties, finally in the mood to look in the mirror and see something other than our vintage Dior kitten heels?



Other than that it’s all going surprisingly well at knowles I greslé chez moi. I’ve decided I’m the self appointed sales (wo)man of the team. An unusual ambition I’ve long nursed is to be a sales person. Other girls wanted to get married or become accountants or doctors (not nurses at Cheltenham Ladies’ College darling, not in the 80s!), but I always wanted to be a sales person. Finally now I am one. All I do all day long is phone people up and try to get them to buy art. Then bombard them with emails. Then chase them on the phone. It’s good fun. I talk for a living. Yvette does everything else. I reckon I’m sorted.

Then on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays we immerse ourselves in the art world in order to become the fountains of knowledge it is necessary to be in order to successfully consult on the subject of contemporary art. I don’t think I’ve been to so many exhibitions in my life. It’s getting on for a dozen a week including two or three private views. And yet the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know, so it seems my increasing knowledge is only sufficing to make me more and more ignorant. In a few years time I shall know almost nothing.

And the dinner guest?
“What a glorious flat”, she said, “so you, with a hint of Holly Golightly...”
Holly Golightly was a bit of a domestic sloven wasn’t she.
How kind friends are to put a generous spin on things.

I google therefore I am. And I think I may be having a coronary. Google didn't tell me that. I managed to work it out for myself. That's quite something these days you know, when even a common or garden round-about has fifteen sets of traffic lights because we humans can't be trusted to look to our right and figure out for ourselves whether moving forward in our motor vehicles would be a suitable course of action or not.

I want to write my diary in the lounge on this once jolly, now filthy, Saturday morning. I unplug the laptop from where it lives in the other room (I can't bear to use the word office). The second I unplug the power the screen goes dark. I can just about make out words behind the grey if I put my nose an inch from the screen and squint. A portable computer whose battery lasts hours on end, power cunningly conserved by directing almost no energy towards allowing the user to see what they're doing. Great, marvellous, how clever. Bill Gates isn't a gazillionaire for nothing. So I spend forty minutes googling through the fog and the fury, trying to find out how, quite, I might adjust the brightness on this stylish little contraption.

Why I can not, like any 'normal' person, simply bring the power-pack through to the lounge as well, I don't know. This would be the sensible course of action. Instead I fling myself around the living room, burn the toast, mutter unspeakable threats to the creators of the sony vaio, almost succeed in removing a generous chunk of my own hair - all in an increasingly irrational frenzy that the computer function in the way I would like it too. And now I can hear mother's words rising out of the sludge: "darling, I don't think anybody would call you normal; highly eccentric maybe, but not normal."

Really, I alarm myself sometimes.

And I had been feeling so mild mannered this morning. But now I'm in a tremendous strop, brought on, I fear, by far too close a proximity to modern technology. It's not right actually. It's not right at all. I should be living in a shed on the side of a mountain in China, like the monks I so envied at the Buddhist film festival. It's cracked up to be pretty tough going, all that ascetic facing up to your inner demons stuff. I don't know though, sometimes I wonder whether it isn't harder to get on with the trials of facing up to your neighbours and this confusing, all consuming, bizarre world we've created for ourselves.

Until last week I didn't have a computer at home. No computer, no telly, no broadband, no toaster even. The only things with a plug were the kettle and the radio, oh and the mobile re-charger. Now, only a week into my newfound techno wizardry and I find myself screaming at the dratted machine at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. I had intended to go to yoga this morning until I decided it'd be better to write. Bad choice, clearly.

I'm just not sure I get it. I'm not quite sure I get anything actually. But this whole techno thing is definitely becoming more and more of a mystery. What's going on? It's a bottomless pit. Disconcertingly so. Not in a bah-humbug on the future, "I remember when a packet of polos was 7 pence" sort of a way, but in a 'who am I? who am I?' overtones of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oryx and Crake, Possibility of an Island, techno navel-gazing sort of a way.

I've noticed it's creeping into contemporary art too. What I'm not sure of is whether these art works are 'about it' or are they simply 'it'? Are they 'it' or are they an image of it? Do they stand at a remove and observe or are they identified with it? And anyway, what is it? I don't know. That's exactly what I don't know.

Some fabulously odd thing at Seventeen. Something described as a 'proprietary compression algorithm, single channel video with sound'. This piece of work, entitled 'Codec', seemed to be the artist, Paul B Davis, explaining to us how to create your own proprietary video compression/decompression algorithm - whatever that might be. We don't see the artist. In fact we don't see a great deal. It's just a projection of a computer screen, screen grab or whatever you call it, with Paul's mouse moving around clicking things here and there and his US accent muttering some (to me) totally meaningless instructions on how to do this and that.

It's not that I didn't like it, I just didn't know what it was. What was I supposed to do with it or glean from it? I had no even vague sense as to what it might be pointing towards. Probably this is simply indicative of my own ignorance. Well undoubtedly so. I did, however, like Seventeen - a lot. I shall be going back there. It's like when you meet someone and they say something and you think, I have absolutely no idea what you just said, but I definitely like you.

This 'single channel video with sound' whatnot was showing in the basement. Two chairs were provided for sitting on. There was a very curious and not entirely pleasant smell that seemed to suggest chronic damp. There were no lights. I had a vague sense of rodents, or at least the need for pest control in one form or another. The whole thing rather reminded me of my student accommodation circa 1993. My Dad insisting on sending in industrial cleaners at his own expense before we moved in, and point blank refusing to sit on the sofa or accept a cup of tea. In retrospect I can see where he was coming from. I must be getting old.

The title of the show is also rather good: Kanye West Fucked Up My Show. You can tell a lot about a show from the quality of its title. The same way you can tell almost everything you need to know about a person from a brief survey of their footwear. It's about integrity.

And now of course the battery has almost run out, so I shall have to go and get the power-pack after all. Oh God. The tragic futility of it all.

It's the Great British mini-monsoon. It's here every June. That's why they've finally built a roof for Wimbledon. As with most things, we're in denial about it, that's all. I quite like it. I like it when I'm at home with the back door open, so I can feel the gentle English humidity rising from the quiet chaos of the lush greenery and the watery sunlight bouncing off the white paint that's beginning to peel away from my beloved wrought iron garden table. Listening to a bird flapping about in the hedge and waiting for the next patch of unexpectedly deep grey to totter across the summer sky.

Sometimes it all gets a bit much and I have to retreat into my little sanctuary and be alone. Alone, listening to the rain. I should do it more often probably. That's no doubt the problem. I have too much to do with other people and not enough to do with myself. That's my life. A constant distraction of other people. The way some people use beer or gambling I suppose, I use extraversion. And then occasionally it all gets too much and I have to retreat. I could do with retreating for a week really, or a month, but as it is, a day will have to do. I've started reading the new Sarah Waters book. My favourite self indulgence: reading a book purely for its own sake. I realised in Waterstones - possibly one of my favourite places on the planet - it's something I rarely do. It sounds fatuous, it probably is fatuous, but I realised yesterday morning, I almost always read for a purpose. Without even hearing the conversation happening in my own head, I tell myself I should read Jung or Deleuze or Tolstoy or Quantum Theory or the Bhagvadgita (which I haven't yet, although it sits expectantly on my bedside table) or some other self-improving tome. I came out of Waterstones with William Boyd, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner and Sarah Waters. Not too bad as far as the hairshirt goes. I persuaded myself, without too much difficulty as it happens, straight into the self indulgence of The Little Stranger. So far it's reminding me of Brideshead, a book of such wit and brilliance it's impossible to read too many times. An interfering, patronising, social climbing nit-wit narrating the story of the downfall of a once grand old family, into whose lives he has pointlessly and without invitation ingratiated himself. The monstrous controlling grand dame, beguiling everyone with her charm, whilst stealing her children's lives from under their very noses, and the misunderstood self-loathing but fundamentally sweet dipso son on the path to self annihilation. I can't put it down. Another distraction I suppose, but certainly a good one. Read good writing, so they say, and your own will benefit. Well, here's hoping anyway.

Someone informed me the other day that art is, by definition (whatever that might mean) 'pointless' and without purpose. That's the contemporary line now, don't you know? Now that 'Art' has become so alienated from life by its own self importance, so needy of a capital 'A' to demonstrate its lofty independence from the boring old nitty-gritty of existence. Well that's nonsense actually. Just because you can't keep your socks in it, doesn't mean you can't make use of it. I happen to know that for a fact, because I myself make use of it on a regular basis. And I don't mean as a means to an end. I don't mean as a means to a living. I don't even mean as a means to accessing joy - although it often facilitates that too. No, I mean in a very practical sense, as a means to stabilise my unsteady and resolutely unpredictable trajectory through life. Through life's crashing disappointments as a matter of fact, of which there seem to be surprisingly many. And as a means of explaining, or consoling oneself, in the face of one's own rather inexplicable and erratic responses to the aforementioned disappointments. Yes, oh yes, someone I trusted, looked up to, loved in a way, has proven themselves to be a contemptible little snake in the grass. My own fault, of course, for projecting my stuff willy-nilly. My own fault for expecting something beyond humanity from someone who is, just like me, horrifyingly human. In a just world we'd all be allowed our humanity unquestioningly. But it's not a just world, and that also can be crashingly disappointing at times, at others, fabulously annoying.

But as I stomp around feeling sorry for myself and snapping at kindly people, what keeps coming back to me is one of the degree show pieces I saw a few weeks ago. That's the great thing about the degree shows. From the ones that stand out, you get the stuff raw, unspoilt and un-tempered. This is the place to sniff out the unmistakeably pungent whiff of existential rage in one of its purest (and probably healthiest) manifestations. The angry young man or woman before they've been ground down by life. By the suffocating necessity of earning a living - that overbearing juggernaut that one can, so easily, lose sight of oneself at the wheel of. By the murky waters of interpersonal politics and striving to get ahead, or even survive, in an unforgiving world. By the energy-sapping, but also, by turns, strangely liberating inevitability of living and dying just another infinitesimal speck of dust on the ceaseless turn of the wheel of life.

She knows she's good, twenty-two-year old Helen Carmel Benigson, presenting her extraordinary multi-media, super-sensory 'hyper-hysterical' installation at the Slade. But that's ok. Why shouldn't she. You need to believe in yourself in this life, because damn sure other people are going to try, many times over the course of a lifetime, to put doubt into your mind about things you've seen with your own two eyes. They'll put you on a pedestal only to try and hack the legs off it. Well you stick to your guns girl. You helped me through a sticky few weeks and I'm grateful to you for it. I hope you've got what it takes to stay the course on track. I for one, shall be rooting for you.

Galleries around the world are closing their doors. Not necessarily once and for all, but certainly, it would seem, for a bit. The gallerist - by and large - is battening down the hatches. Shutting their outposts to focus on first base in some cases. Finding altogether less traditional and more economical ways to show and flog art in others. Approach, Albion, Allsopp etc etc.

So hats off to Iwan Wirth who has just announced that Hauser & Wirth are to open a swanky and fairly massive new exhibition space in New York this September. The man who appeared at number five on last November’s Art Review Power One Hundred…. is a legend. I can’t personally vouch for the truth of it, but word has it that as well as being a famously shrewd operator, he's also a thoroughly good egg. He's certainly committed to making a buck or two - one ambrosial story tells that dining out recently Wirth sold a Martin Creed whilst in the loo. Hilarious. But there also appears to be a significant and highly plaudible degree of commitment to showing work that seems to me to be seriously un-sellable. Sure, there's nothing wrong with coining it in if it’s done in the right way. It's got to be done in the right way though. Flogging mediocre stuff just because you've managed to find someone wealthy and ill-informed enough to buy it isn't a good enough excuse. I'd go as far as to say it's morally questionable actually. You might as well be selling double glazing. Or mobile phones. Not that flogging double glazing or mobile phones is morally questionable per se. As with everything else, it all depends on how it's done. Or why it's done. It's all about intent, no? Anyway, enough moralising from me. If I were making a fortune flogging anything no doubt I'd be off my high horse quicker than you can say Affordable Art Fair. So I might as well dismount now and save myself the embarrassing fall from grace later on.

The latest H&W 'opening reception', at what was once the Midland Bank on Piccadilly, was a surreal treat. Rather than the usual crew of bourgeois pony's neighing on and chucking back the free plonk like its Christmas, or the ocean of skinny jeans spilling their Peroni everywhere, here was row upon row of people actually engaging with the art work. Perched in silence on gleaming white puffy seated benches like little fluffy clouds, a rainbow of disparate art enthusiasts, sporting black head phones (if that’s what we're still calling them these days are we? probably not. oh well.) watching David Claerbout's latest filmic offerings.



Sometimes you go to a gallery and you think, blimey I couldn't hack this for long. There's something strange in the air. A disquieting vibe or something. Oddly I had that in Sadie Coles' garage the other week. Perhaps there was a storm brewing or something. But at Hauser & Wirth I didn't want to leave. I could have stayed there all evening. In fact, I just about did.



Delicious little chaps in black aprons handing round the beers and a charming lady at the top of the stairs warning you to tread carefully as it's jolly dark in the basement. And so it was too. In an almost black dungeon-esque vaulted room was showing an 18 minute video installation entitled Sunrise, depicting a nocturnal scene of a maid cleaning house and setting up breakfast in a beautiful and intriguing modernist villa in Belgium. I do like the low countries. Being a nocturnal scene even the film was almost black. Goodness knows how she could see to clean or why she didn't put the lights on. So as not to awaken the occupants of the open-plan apartment perhaps, whom we catch a very brief glimpse of, in the form of lumps under the duvets, sleeping head to head on either side of a dividing wall, in separate double beds. Three coffee cups are laid out but we don't see a third occupant. We wonder though. We wonder who lives such an extraordinary life, in such an extraordinary villa, amidst such an exquisite landscape. We never see the house hold coming to life. Rather we follow the maid as she sweeps the yard and then, just before day break, collects her bicycle, pushes it past the landscaped pond, down the drive-way and out onto the deserted country road, along which she cycles home as the sun rises, to the accompaniment of Rachmaninov's Vocalise, that gives the last minutes of the film an unexpectedly emotive and uplifting finish. It was a thoroughly enjoyable twenty minutes in a dark basement. And everything else I saw there was great too. Crumbs, I like this place. I love Hauser & Wirth.



And now I know why I seem always to 'love' things so. I read in The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet it's because I'm Tigger type. What the Jungian (the slightly woolly one anyway) might called an Extrovert. Buddhists might refer to as the Greed type. Tigger marvels at everything. He throws himself at the world with larger than life enthusiastic abandon. He's already at the top of the tree before he's remembered that he's not very good at climbing down. Tigger believes in everything and believes that everything is something he can do. All things are possible to a Tigger - at least until he tries them!



This, it would seem, is me. Purebred Tigger type. But I've decided I don't mind that, because, as William Blake said "If the Sun and Moon were to Doubt / They'd immediately go out." So, throwing caution to the wind I shout: "Three cheers for Iwan Wirth!" Boing.



Beverley Knowles Fine Art has now been superseded by Knowles / Gresle. Knowles / Gresle is an art consultancy and curatorial project. It sits somewhere between a business and a creative experience, blurring the lines of each to the benefit of both.
The Knowles / Gresle website will be up and running shortly at which time beverleyknowles.com will automatically re-direct.

Gorgeous Ellie the Intern from Sweden and Minnesota is away finishing her dissertation. Incarcerated in New Cross. Twenty thousand words on memory and the family album with an opener from Anna Karenina. Nice. Plus a further twenty thousand words on various theory-laden Goldsmithsie topics. We got an email from her yesterday saying she thought she might be having a nervous breakdown. I hope she was joking, poor flower. Thank goodness those days are over. If I had the chance to be twenty-one again I wouldn't take it. Even the beauty and naivety of youth are no temptation. Thirty-something's okay. And seventy something's going to be a right laugh I reckon. The older you get the more outrageous you can be and nobody bats an eyelid. What's infantile at twenty-five seems sage at seventy-five.

But nothing could excuse the private view I went to last night in Kings Cross. It was terrible. I don't like to slag things off too unthinkingly, but really, this was terrible. It was beyond terrible. 'A cosmological ricochet which is conceptualised through repeated images of bananas...' I'm not even kidding. That's what the text says. An artist + gallerist showing her own work in her own gallery. Supporting texts by artists the gallery is showing later in the year. A tad sycophantic they turned out to be, rather unsurprisingly. I'll treat you to one Q&A.

Q: 'And now you have a new enormous gallery space in Kings Cross and you collaborate with all these different artists. It feels like a very exciting new chapter in the story. Do you ever feel so happy you could burst?'
A: 'Yes, all the time… Britain is the most civilized and polite places (sic) I've ever been. I like British people a lot. They are reliable, creative and exciting.'

For the love of God.

Warm white table wine served in a plastic cup for a pound. Bargain. And a bowl of pretzels. Yummy. And in the catalogue a photograph of the artist in 1992 with Lauren Bacall. A joke peut-être? A performance? I tried so hard to sniff out even a hint of irony but failed utterly. There was a great quotation from Albert Einstein on the promotional material. 'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.' That was by far the best thing about the show. In fact it was the only good thing about it. But one good quote does not an exhibition make, unfortunately. If it did, the curator's job would be rather easier than it is.

By contrast there was a cracker on at Haunch of Venison in the ex-Museum of Mankind, now the Royal Academy. Or is it Haunch of Venison? I'm not sure - it's confusing. Anyway, it's 6 Burlington Gardens. No matter whose patch it is, this exhibition – Mythologies – was a delight. The only bad thing about it, and thereby also about this untimely 'review', is the fact that it's now over. I'm quite of a mind though that such details don't make the mention of it redundant. People are still talking about the seminal Freeze show they never saw and maybe Mythologieswill turn out to be another such myth – the show one never saw but never admits to not having seen! So in case you're in that slightly tragi-comic boat, here you are: a belated / pre-emptive heads up.


The fact that it was staged in an ex-museum and on/off Royal Academy venue presented a significant double-edged sword. It meant that an exhibition devised by a gallery that's ostensibly a commercial concern was competing, in terms of viewer perception, against publicly funded exhibitions that have no selling agenda at all. Haunch of Venison set the bar very high for themselves. The stunning location meant the work and the curation had to rise to the occasion in quite spectacular fashion. On this kind of platform they couldn't afford to put on anything even approaching a so-so show. Any hint of mediocrity would have translated immediately into a tremendous flop and staggering embarrassment.

On the other hand, the setting would lend vast kudos and seriousness, as long as the show had broad enough shoulders to carry it. Which it did. It was intelligently curated, visually beautiful, conceptually meaty, and incredibly wide in the range of work it delivered. Tony Cragg, Bill Viola, the magnificent Sophie Calle, Simon Patterson, good old Damo of course, still on the sparkly skull thing – now wall-based – but never mind! Some fascinatingly disturbing taxidermied Dobermans – 'archetypes of urban violence and disorder' so we're told – courtesy of German artist Jochem Hendricks, and relative newcomer Nicholas Hlobo in the wake of his solo show at Tate Modern's Level Two earlier in the year. And much, much, more to thrill and delight.


Art Rabbit described it as 'one of the most ambitious group exhibitions ever mounted in London by a private gallery.' It certainly catapulted Haunch of Venison up to a new level. I'd go as far as to say it rose head and shoulders above most exhibitions currently showing in public galleries in London, many of which you have to pay to see. For my money, it knocked the socks off theRussian Linesman, the Hayward show curated by Mark Wallinger, that plays an unsuccessful round of Russian Roulette with the always tempting but highly risky game of curatorial ego trip.



The only sad thing is I can't now recommend you go and see it. Have I let you down dear friend and reader? I feel the need to stick up for myself, to remind you that I'm not often bringing you a cup of tea that's already cooled. Forgive me, you know how insecure we arty types are! In my defence I mention that the 2009 Turner Prize nominees include Roger Hiorns' Art Angel commission Seizure, an installation bigged up in the diary by yours truly some six months ago. I risk life and limb in the Elephant & Castle to bring you the latest news. The Elephant & Castle, New Cross, even Fulham – surely a destination more than any where a balaclava is more or less mandatory in order to respectably disembark the tube.



Apparently one of the jury members, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones, is big into Enrico David, but that aside, my money's on Hiorns for Turner victory 2009. Twenty five grand for Hiorns and a first for little Ellie.

I read recently that when writing one is best advised to know what the chase is and cut to it. With that in mind, I'm delighted to share with you the exciting news that I've taken on a business and creative partner - Yvette Gresle. Together we will be known as Knowles / Gresle. Knowles / Gresle will be a multi-disciplinary encounter that will be a platform for showcasing challenging creative projects and making a living at the same time. Et voila!

Knowles / Gresle will have three equally focal hubs. Firstly, as a financially viable art dealership and consultancy service, whose clients will be procuring the finest contemporary art for their collections, under our expert guidance. Secondly, as a curatorial base, without financial aspiration, for our own personal interest in challenging ephemeral, installation and performance art. And thirdly, these two strands will be brought together and developed theoretically through our own ongoing writing projects. The whole encounter will sit somewhere between a business and a creative experience, blurring the lines of each to the benefit of both.

I'm very proud of the fantastic things that have come out of Beverley Knowles Fine Art and I'm really grateful to all the wonderful people who've been involved along the way. I wouldn't change a minute of any of that. But nothing is forever and now is the time for the next big thing. In order to get Knowles / Gresle up and running we're going to need to re-claim the time and energy that is currently being given to the space that is Beverley Knowles Fine Art at 88 Bevington Road. We will therefore be saying a sad, but also a joyful goodbye to the bubblegum pink gallery that has been my beloved professional home since October 2005. We've had some times here for sure - the sublime to the unmentionable, the tears and the tantrums. And of course there'll be plenty more of all that under the exciting new auspices of Knowles / Gresle.

Beverley Knowles Fine Art will morphose seamlessly into Knowles / Gresle on 21 May 2009. I'll let you know the new contact and website details nearer the time. I look forward to introducing you to Yvette.

With lots of warm wishes for now and the future...



B x


About Yvette Gresle
Of French descent and hailing jointly from South Africa and Seychelles Yvette Gresle has recently embraced London as her spiritual and artistic home. In 2000 she graduated from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg with an MA in Art History, pre-empting her enthusiasm for all things English with a thesis on Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. More recently she spent four years as a full time researcher, exploring public intellectual life and contemporary art in post apartheid South Africa. For the past twelve years she has worked as an independent arts writer, contributing regularly to contemporary arts magazine Art South Africa (www.artsouthafrica.com).