Lizzie Collins, former auctioneer at Bonhams in Oxford and founder of the online Zuleika Gallery, launches a pop-gallery in Woodstock to coincide with one of the year's biggest show's at nearby Blenheim Palace. She tells TIM HUGHES what it's all about

Next Wednesday, one of Italy’s most talented and important contemporary artists, Michelangelo Pistoletto launches a solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace.

To mark the occasion, I am holding a pop-up exhibition for Zuleika Gallery at the nearby Crown Inn on the same day.

It is fitting for the man who was such important player in the establishment of the Arte Povera movement in Italy during the late 1960s, that his work is being shown in such an unconventional environment.

Pistoletto is known for having redefined the boundaries of art through his work discovering new ‘worthless’ materials from everyday objects such as mirrors and doors and elevating them to high art.

His 'Arte Povera' redefined the materials for art. Essentially a conceptual movement, it redefined the norms of representation and expectation. In a similar way, Zuleika Gallery is subverting expectation and redefining the place for the viewer to encounter art.

For one day only you will have the opportunity to see work by some of the most recognised and important artists of today’s contemporary art scene, including Sir Howard Hodgkin, Antony Gormley and Sean Scully, in this democratic setting.

Visitors to this popular pub in Woodstock High Street, will be able to see at close quarters a mirror multiple by Pistoletto while also being given a sneak preview of the next Zuleika Gallery pop-up exhibition, Hidden, which will be opening in London the following week in Mason’s Yard.

Exhibited alongside Pistoletto will be work by some of the brightest emerging talents in contemporary art who, as it happens, are talent nurtured in Oxfordshire.

On view will be work by Aglaé Bassens, graduate from Ruskin College in 2007 and recent nominee for the Contemporary British Art Painting Prize. Her work is already in the collection of Charles Saatchi.

Also showing will be Matthew David Smith, a graduate of Oxford Brookes University in 2014, whose collectors include the human rights activist Shami Chakrabarti.

These two artists are rising stars on the international exhibition scene and along side their work will be paintings by the talented Peter Care, an abstract painter whose studio is in Oxfordshire.

These artists are being joined in the London exhibition by the ceramicist Claudia Clare and Professor of Sculpture at the Slade, Edward Allington. Also on view in London will be one of Sir Howard Hodgkin’s most recent oil paintings, ‘Tide’, recently completed in 2016.

Zuleika Gallery’s aim is to throw a light on the work of these talented emerging artists while celebrating the work of some of the most established and groundbreaking artists of today.

  • The Woodstock exhibition will be open from 11 until 4pm and from 6-8.30pm. For all enquiries please email events@zuleikagallery.com or call Lizzie Collins on 07939566085.
  • The gallery takes its name from Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm's 1911 satire of undergraduate life at Oxford.