Len Gordon

London

Founder and Contributing Writer at Art Plugged

Art is a line around your thoughts.

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Articles

Inside Yield Gallery: David Izzard’s Stealth Strategy in a Noisy Art Market

3 weeks ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

In a contemporary art market increasingly shaped by spectacle, David Izzard is choosing a more measured path. As the founding director of London’s Yield Gallery, he has built a reputation rooted in discretion, rigour and enduring relationships. His approach is clear: rather than chase trends, Yield focuses on trust. Artworks are never treated as stock, but considered carefully within the context of a collector’s vision and the gallery’s wider programme.
Childhood, solitude and protest: Yoshitomo Nara at the Hayward Gallery

3 weeks ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

Something tender and charged hums beneath the concrete skin of the Hayward Gallery this June. Inside its Brutalist vault—part fortress, part reliquary—Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s universe unfolds not with spectacle, but with stillness. Forty years of work speak less in declarations than in glances. Big eyes. Small gestures. Echoes of unrest. The figures don’t invite you in. They hold your gaze and wait for you to catch up.
Curating Collapse: Nadim Samman on Art, AI, and the Future of Cultural Systems

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

As machine learning continues to reshape everything from creativity to governance, few curators are confronting its implications as incisively as Dr Nadim Samman. The Berlin-based curator and philosopher is leading Vienna Digital Cultures 2025, a festival anchored by the theme “Model Collapse”—a phrase that encapsulates the systemic failures of our time, from generative AI dysfunction and ecological breakdown to the fragmentation of political discourse and the erosion of shared truths.
On the Fractured Bodies of Lala Drona

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

Contributing writer chronicling contemporary art’s beautiful mess — when he can get there. Survives on openings, opinions, one gallery, one artwork at a time. Considers espresso a meal.
What Power Tried to Hide: Stephen Shames and the Black Panthers

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

History doesn’t always reside in textbooks. Sometimes, it unfolds in the streets—through the posture of protest, the uniform of resistance, the stance of a person confronting state power. In 1966, in Oakland, California, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party, introducing a new visual and ideological language of resistance.
In the Dream Logic of Joshua Hagler, Now Æmen Ededéen, and the Meaning of Meaning

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

Contributing writer chronicling contemporary art’s beautiful mess — when he can get there. Survives on openings, opinions, one gallery, one artwork at a time. Considers espresso a meal.
In Mike Silva’s Paintings, Photographic Memory Is Reframed in Light

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

Artist Mike Silva paints like someone whose memories course through his hands. With delicate brushwork and muted palettes, he evokes the taciturnity of private interiors, the soft ache of recollection, and the transience of light. His works don’t merely depict the past—they seem to breathe with it. Born in Sweden and based in London, Silva has become known for translating the intimate and unassuming—unmade beds, fleeting glances, the hum of lived-in rooms—into haunting, photorealistic paintings.
Five Artists You Should Know: Rethinking Identity, Place and Practice in Contemporary Art

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

In the landscape of contemporary art, the question of what is seen — and who is heard — is being constantly renegotiated. While the global art market continues to elevate spectacle and novelty, a quieter shift is underway: artists are increasingly using their work to question the very structures that frame identity, geography and authorship. This shift is not simply aesthetic. It is political, social and deeply personal.
Eilen Itzel Mena Confronts Invisibility Through Ritual and Ancestral Abstraction

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

You can feel the spirit of the Bronx in Eilen Itzel Mena’s brushstrokes—loose, confident, alive. And if you listen closely, the breeze of the Caribbean whispers through her colours. Mena, an Afro-Dominican American artist, makes work that doesn’t just show up—it takes up space. It says: I’m here. I’ve been here. Her roots stretch between two places that pulse with cultural memory: the South Bronx and Baní, in the Dominican Republic. That tension—and that richness—runs through her work.
Freya Fang Wang Lets the Painting Lead, in the Taoist Spirit of Wu Wei

1 month ago | artplugged.co.uk | Len Gordon

Freya Fang Wang’s paintings ripple and pulse as if caught mid-breath—each canvas a living record of movement, resonance, and quiet reflection. Rooted in Taoist philosophy yet distinctly contemporary in execution, her work explores stillness, spontaneity, and the invisible forces that shape our internal and external worlds.