Alex Margo Arden is an artist who enjoys research. Her passion for piecing together a narrative from historical clues bubbles up in everything she does, from last year’s Accounts – an installation of decommissioned male mannequins she retrieved from the National Motor Museum, which won the 2025 Arts Council Collection Frieze Acquisitions prize – to her recreation of artworks damaged by protestors.
Arden doesn’t shy away from a tricky subject. The topics she is drawn to may appear eclectic, but they are united by a shared specificity. Take her new show at London’s Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, ‘Nothing Personal’, which is inspired by Amy Winehouse – or more specifically, by Winehouse’s belongings.
‘This is a much more intimate portrait of her, not about her image or her music, but one which goes beyond the surface’
Alex Margo Auden
By shifting the focus to the things that make up a life, rather than the life itself, Arden is asking the more interesting questions. Crucially, there is no imagery of Amy Winehouse here, yet she is alive in her absence. What is the essence of a person, Arden asks us, presenting here Winehouse’s books, make-up, pictures and games. There are things she owned, things she used, things she never knew she had and things she never got to receive, which raises its own batch of questions – what is different about celebrity ownership and how does death change who an item belongs to? Fetishised, glamorised or sold – either way, the waters get muddy.
Why Amy Winehouse, I ask Arden when she shows me around the exhibition before the opening. ‘There is no one else of her generation like Amy Winehouse,’ she says. ‘Her image is akin to Elvis or Marilyn, or Audrey Hepburn – people whose images become heavily emblematic of many things. This is a much more intimate portrait of her, not about her image or her music, but one which goes beyond the surface. I think that's what a lot of my work does. All my research projects are about things that I think are interesting or troubling.’
Arden completed her postgraduate studies in 2025 at Royal Academy Schools, but has long been fascinated by the questions her research projects raise. Her work is a bewitching blend of conceptual art project and methodical archival research, although the meticulous standards she maintains for the latter cannot be emphasised enough.
These skills take shape most impressively in Library (2026), a work made up of more than 400 of books, all titles that were in Winehouse's own collection, each sourced in the exact same edition as Winehouse’s documented copy.
Arden discovered some of the books Winehouse owned through an auction held by the singer’s estate, others through paparazzi photos of her holding books, or occasionally through interviews she did at home, where books were visible in the background. Sometimes Arden could only see a glimpse of the spine, with no text visible, or the image was so heavily pixelated she could barely make it out. Often, the book would no longer be available, or she couldn’t get the exact edition Winehouse had – Arden says she sometimes had to buy 20 copies to get the right one. She has bought books from all over the world – India, the Philippines, Australia, America, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and on it goes.
‘They're the exact set that Amy had,’ says Arden. ‘They had the same birthing as the copies of Amy's – these weren't owned by her, but collectively the library is her collection of books. It simultaneously becomes hers and everyone else's, which feels even more loaded than the object being about someone having touched it. These have been touched by hundreds of people. They’ve not gone from a factory to a shop to Amy.’
To look at the books here – there’s Delia Smith cookbooks, Catch-22, Candace Bushnell, Chekhov, Weird Websites and How to Pass Your Driving Theory Test (several copies), Beckham biographies, Booker Prize-shortlisted novels – is an emotional experience. Is there anything more exposing than revealing what you actually read? It is a profound interpretation of who Amy Winehouse was, disregarding the fame and the music and the tabloids and the imagery. In her absence, here, there is an intimacy. It is hugely moving.
Elsewhere, Arden has gathered Winehouse’s make-up, again faithfully sourcing the exact pieces she used, navigating discontinued products and issues of rarity. ‘The whole exhibition proposes to show a different angle,’ says Arden. ‘Of course it's a portrait of Amy, but it's also a portrait of the 2000s. It's a portrait of all of the other people whose objects these were. Even a portrait of the idea that these things have been kept. This make-up has been kept unused for 20 years. What does it mean for things to exist? There isn’t a record of historical objects like this – these are not objects that are in museum collections.’
Winehouse’s jigsaw puzzles, too, are poignant, speaking to her search for mindfulness and the recovery programmes she went through. The jigsaws, of The Simpsons, The Beatles, Casablanca, Cadbury chocolates, are a record of both a point in history and a state of mind.
As well as the recreated collections of Winehouse’s belongings, there are also reconstructions of things she never owned. Arden has duplicated a birthday card Winehouse was given by Mark Ronson and Adele, but never received, after she didn’t attend her own birthday party or greet her guests. Arden’s duplicated copy is identical to the original, down to the idiosyncrasies in the handwriting and the image on the front. ‘My whole practice is rehearsing and repetition,’ she says.
All the information Arden has drawn on is public, sourced from paparazzi photos or documentaries or interviews. ‘I'm just the person to have brought all this together, or seen that there is something there,’ she says. ‘It's very different to a lot of archival research, where it is about finding stuff that's really hard to access. This was really easy to access. What was really hard was getting it all together in the room.’
'Nothing Personal' is at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in London until 23 January 2027
