Paul Hodgson, ZOT , Varvara Roza Galleries, 8 Duke Street, St James’s
Paul Hodgson, ZOT
27 February to 25 March 2026
Varvara Roza Galleries, 8 Duke Street, St James’s
At Varvara Roza Galleries, increasingly recognised as one of London’s most intellectually assured contemporary spaces, ZOT marks a confident new exhibition by British artist Paul Hodgson, presented under the discerning direction of Varvara Roza and curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou.
Roza’s programme has become synonymous with exhibitions that privilege thought as much as form, and ZOT continues this trajectory. The exhibition is concerned less with finished artworks than with the unstable, speculative conditions from which art emerges.
The title, drawn from the Dutch word for “fool,” famously adopted by Willem de Kooning in his 1940s paintings, signals Hodgson’s embrace of productive misdirection. Here, uncertainty becomes a generative force rather than a flaw.
Working across painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and digital processes, Hodgson approaches the studio as both subject and method. His constructed “sculptor’s studio,” a space nested within his own workspace, allows artistic gestures to be revisited, dismantled and reimagined. History becomes elastic, something handled rather than inherited.
Recycled lithographic plates bend into provisional sculptural forms recalling John Chamberlain, while text appears as action rather than statement. Images invert, dissolve and reform; analogue processes collide with digital logic, destabilising intention and authorship alike.
What emerges is an exhibition poised between archaeology and speculation. Hodgson does not offer resolution but conditions, asking how artistic voice can be authenticated at a moment when authorship itself is increasingly uncertain, shaped by technological acceleration and shifting cultural truths.
Within Varvara Roza’s carefully calibrated space, ZOT unfolds as both exhibition and inquiry, a reminder that art remains most alive not when fixed, but when still in motion.
