Arden has been rapidly rising in the art world with extensive research projects, such as Rock Paper Scissors, where she remade and recollected the library book collages of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton, with remakings by the artist, and a hugely successful exhibition earlier this year at Auto Italia. Arden was also nominated for the Times Breakthrough at the Sky Arts Awards, alongside Owen Cooper and Nussaibah Younis: the artist describes her nomination as “such an honour – getting to be on television and meet all these incredible people.”

Auto Italia’s director, Dr Maggie Matić, is Arden’s champion for The Wick. They said: “Alex Margo Arden is a true and singular artist, with a playful and incisive way of looking at the world. Working with her for her exhibition, Safety Curtain, at Auto Italia was a total joy. She transformed the gallery into a stage to question concepts of authorship, artifice and value. She has an obsessive and meticulous research practice, which manifests in the way her work seduces you with its surface and then pulls you into something far more complex – layered fictions that feel both intimate and unsettling. What I find so brilliant about Alex is her delicious ability to make the familiar strange, and to turn spectacle inside out with humour, intelligence and conceptual rigour. Beyond her work, Alex is an angel and such an important presence in the London art scene – always bringing sharp insight, unparalleled charm and of course, an incredible look.”

“A lot of my influences come from the intersection of history, media, and materiality” Arden told The Wick. “I’m drawn to how cultural moments and acts of protest or creativity leave traces, and how those traces can be revisited, reinterpreted, or reactivated. My approach is quite interdisciplinary and conceptually driven, so I tend to move fluidly between sculpture, installation, painting, analogue photography, collage, and performance depending on what the idea calls for.”

In recent projects, for example, Arden has “rematerialised climate activist protests within museums to give their actions a kind of permanence and to question value, impact, and access.” She’s also retraced Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton’s defaced Islington Library books as a way to engage “with queer histories through acts of reconstruction.” Another project involved working with the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office’s evidence from the Rust shooting – using it to explore responsibility and interpretation. Meanwhile for a painting project Arden explains, she “recreated all the cave paintings from the Margate Caves as theatrical backdrops – thinking about restoration, erasure, and how re-inscribing something can both preserve and overwrite it at the same time.”


Arden’s next solo exhibition in London will take place at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, the result of the artist’s winning the inaugural Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize at Frieze London for By All Accounts. A new project with Ginny on Frederick is also in the works – and some other exciting European projects Arden can’t yet reveal. We’re already excited to see what this engaging, dynamic artist does next. “I’m always revisiting and reworking – using artistic processes to question how we understand events, histories, and images, and to explore what it means to make something visible again in a new context.”