HELEA Gallery·Nov 5Standing Still in Front of a Painting: A Ten-Minute ExperimentIn a museum, we spend about twenty seconds in front of a single painting. That’s less time than it takes to pick a sticker in a messaging…
HELEA Gallery·Nov 3The Art of Pleasing Everyone: What Lies Behind Kitsch in PaintingThe word ‘kitsch’ first appeared in Munich in the second half of the nineteenth century, and over the following century and a half it has…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 27The Secret Language of Painters: Hidden Details Most Viewers MissA mirror, a skull, a snuffed-out candle — in old paintings, even the smallest things can matter. What artists concealed in plain sight, and…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 12Why the Impressionists Painted Ugly PlacesRailway stations, factory chimneys, smoky embankments, drab suburbs — the Impressionists stubbornly chose subjects deemed unfit for…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 9The Alchemy of the Ordinary: How Plain Jugs, Glass and Fruit on Canvas Became High ArtFor centuries the academies kept this genre at the very bottom of the hierarchy — yet it turned out to be a territory of absolute painterly…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 7Wildlife as a Source of Calm: Why Add Animal Art to Your CollectionFrom the bulls of Lascaux to François Pompon’s polar bear: why animal art remained in the shadow of other genres for centuries, and why it…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 6The Paintings Nobody Wanted to BuyThere is a particular genre of historical irony: the painting that draws queues today once failed to find a single buyer. And we are not…
HELEA Gallery·Oct 2What Painters Cribbed from PhotographersWhen the daguerreotype was unveiled to the public in 1839, painters agreed almost unanimously that their profession was finished. It wasn’t…
HELEA Gallery·Sep 30How One Painter Could Change the Fashion for ColourIn the early nineteenth century a newcomer arrived on the painter’s palette: chrome yellow. Based on lead chromate, the pigment appeared in…
HELEA Gallery·Sep 28Why Artists Stole from One Another — and Nobody Called It PlagiarismPicture a workshop in the sixteenth century. A boy arrives at about twelve and spends his first years inventing precisely nothing — he…
