Paul Hodgson: ZOT: presented by Varvara Roza Galleries, curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou

British artist Paul Hodgson works fluidly across drawing, painting, photography, digital print and sculpture, restaging moments from art history to question how artworks are formed, fixed and understood. ZOT takes its title from the Dutch word meaning "fool" or "crazy," a term adopted by Willem de Kooning in certain of his black-and-white paintings of the 1940s, where words, symbols and biomorphic forms emerge from gestural fields. For Hodgson, ZOT signals a productive sense of "misguidedness" at the heart of artistic practice, embracing uncertainty, error and change as generative forces.

The exhibition brings together 20 art works that unfold the studio as a site of testing and experimentation, where images and objects remain provisional and in flux. Moving between analogue and digital processes, Hodgson appropriates and subverts visual fragments from other artists, inverting positives into negatives, collapsing figuration into abstraction and text, and allowing material processes to rub against digital information. In works such as Untitled (Zot), 2024, and Untitled (Zot 3), 2025, recycled lithographic aluminium plates are shaped by hand into sculptural forms that recall the compressed gestures of John Chamberlain, while retaining a light, provisional expressionist immediacy. As Hodgson reflects, "With each 'finished' work, the viewer is presented with something that appears stable and familiar. And yet, the language and tropes of 'fixedness' have been used to deconstruct and destabilize."