London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
And off piste we go. Here’s your daily London fix for August 8th, 2026
There are 1,851 works in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Paintings. Drawings. Prints. Photographs. Sculpture. Architectural models. Things you immediately understand. Things you don’t. Things you walk straight past.
And then there’s a pair of old boots.
Well, not quite a pair.
That’s the thing.
They’re in the small Weston Room, one of just nineteen works in a space curated by Ryan Gander RA. RA stands for Royal Acadecian and Ryan Gander’s the head honcho, the overall coordinator for the 258th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
But the seen-better-days old boots are the thing. Everything about them is a show-stopper.
No question about it, they’re old leather boots. Heavy, battered, workaday things.
Except they’ve been silver-plated.
Not painted silver. Not sprayed silver. Silver-plated. In Sheffield.
And they’re beautiful.
Beautiful and troubling.
One boot stands upright.
The other has fallen over.
And then look at the lace.
It appears to be one lace. One continuous lace shared by both boots.
They’re not simply sitting beside each other.
They’re conjoined.
One lace binds them together.
And it’s taut.
Which gives the whole thing a curious sense of movement.
Is the upright boot dragging the fallen one along?
Or is it trying to get away from it?
Is the fallen boot holding the other one back?
You can read it any of those ways.
And that one shared lace somehow speaks volumes.
The trouble is, what it speaks isn’t entirely clear.
Dependence?
Attachment?
Love?
Resentment?
Obligation?
Two lives so intertwined that neither can move without affecting the other?
A pair.
But maybe not quite a pair.
I stood looking at them for quite a while.
I hadn’t looked at the catalogue. I didn’t know what the piece was called. I didn’t know anything about the artist. Artists plural as it happens.
I was just looking.
And I thought, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this one is called Aversion.”
That was the word that came into my head.
Aversion.
Two things conjoined but somehow recoiling from each other. One upright. One down. Connected. Inseparable. But not exactly in harmony.
I wondered what the backstory was.
And whether my guess was on the money.
Or at least close.
Then I looked it up.
The work is called The Divided Self.
Well.
That’ll do.
And then the story gets considerably more interesting.
It’s two artists. They call themselves Zatorski + Zatorski.
Who on earth are Zatorski + Zatorski?
Finding out isn’t easy.
They’re an artistic partnership. Their first names are Thomas and Angel. One is Polish, the other Italian. They both trained as artists. They met in Tel Aviv at Sotheby’s International Young Art exhibition. They subsequently married in the Vatican.
And somewhere along the way, Thomas and Angel became Zatorski + Zatorski.
Even their living arrangements are unusual. They’re London-based but live and work aboard a restored Dutch sailing vessel called De Walvisch.
Not a bad name for a ship. It means ‘the whale.’
And then there’s the other name. The name of the artistic partnership.
Zatorski + Zatorski.
We know that’s the name under which they make and exhibit their art.
What’s much harder to discover is exactly where the name came from.
Was Zatorski originally the surname of one of them?
Did they both take it?
Is it an invented artistic identity?
I couldn’t establish that.
Which somehow makes them more intriguing.
Because now go back and look at those boots.
Two people.
One name, doubled.
Two boots.
One lace.
Conjoined.
And the work is called The Divided Self.
You begin to wonder.
Is this highly personal?
Is there something autobiographical going on here?
Are those two boots, in some sense, those two artists?
Does that single lace mean something?
Is it the thing that joins them?
Is it love? Marriage? Dependence? Attachment? Confinement?
Is one pulling the other along?
Is one trying to escape?
Is one holding the other back?
And what about that fallen boot?
Does that speak to us?
Or are we marching confidently up completely the wrong road?
We don’t know.
And that’s important.
There’s nothing I’ve found that entitles us to say, “This is a portrait of their relationship.”
It might not be personal at all.
The boots might signify something completely different.
But once you know something about Zatorski + Zatorski, it becomes very difficult to stand in front of The Divided Self and not at least ask the question.
And then comes one tiny phrase in the catalogue that makes the whole thing more intriguing still.
These aren’t boots they found in a junk shop.
The catalogue says they were “worn by the artist”.
Singular.
Not “worn by the artists”.
The work is one of fifteen pairs of leather boots, worn sequentially between 2010 and 2025, subsequently silver-plated in Sheffield and presented on Yorkshire limestone.
Fifteen pairs.
Fifteen years.
But “worn by the artist”.
Who?
Thomas?
Angel?
We don’t know.
And I don’t think we should quietly turn “the artist” into “the artists” because that would resolve something the catalogue itself leaves unresolved.
Perhaps “the artist” means Zatorski + Zatorski, the single artistic identity these two people have created.
Perhaps it doesn’t.
Again, we don’t know.
But think how strangely all these things begin to echo one another.
Two artists.
One artistic name.
Two boots.
One lace.
And “the artist”.
Singular.
All in a work called The Divided Self.
Maybe it’s coincidence.
Maybe it’s the whole point.
That’s the fascination of it.
There’s something else.
These boots have really been worn.
Look at them.
The creases are real.
The battered leather is real.
There’s a hole in the sole.
Somebody has walked miles in these things.
Somebody has lived in them.
And that matters.
Because you’re not looking at an artist’s representation of wear and tear.
You’re looking at the wear and tear itself.
Time has helped make this sculpture.
Walking has helped make it.
Living has helped make it.
Old shoes are intimate things.
They take the shape of the person who wears them. They record weight, gait, habit, distance.
A painting is made by somebody.
A pair of boots is inhabited by somebody.
And these boots have been inhabited.
Then something utterly ordinary, something that would normally be thrown away when it ceased to be useful, has been taken to Sheffield and silver-plated.
Preserved.
Elevated.
Made precious.
Almost turned into a relic.
And yours for £19,850.
Yes.
£19,850.
For a pair of old boots.
“Tough as old boots” suddenly acquires a rather different meaning.
There’s a joke sitting there waiting to be made.
Twenty thousand pounds for a pair of old boots.
But I’m not sure the joke survives very long once you’ve actually seen them.
Because they’re terrific.
And I should make something clear.
The price wasn’t what stopped me.
There isn’t a £19,850 price tag dangling beside the boots.
You have to look it up in the catalogue.
What stopped me was the work.
The silver.
The positioning.
One standing.
One fallen.
And above all, that lace.
That single, taut connection between them.
One seems to be going somewhere.
The other doesn’t.
One might be dragging the other along.
Or perhaps one is desperately trying to get away and discovering that it can’t.
I knew none of the backstory.
I didn’t know the price.
I didn’t know the title.
I didn’t know who Zatorski + Zatorski were.
And still the thing got me.
That’s good art.
It doesn’t have to tell you what to think.
It gives you something to think with.
My Aversion may be miles away from what Zatorski + Zatorski intended.
My suspicion that The Divided Self might be intensely personal may be completely wrong.
And my reading of that shared lace may say considerably more about me than it does about them.
But the work made me ask.
And I’m still asking.
That’s one of the great pleasures of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
There are 1,851 works in there.
You wander.
You glance.
You move on.
And every so often one of those works puts out a hand, grabs you by the lapels and says, “Look at me.”
The Divided Self did that to me.
And there isn’t much time left.
Soon the Summer Exhibition comes down. The extraordinary assemblage breaks apart. Many of those works will go into private ownership. Some may never be seen publicly again.
Nobody standing in those rooms today knows which of those 1,851 works people will still be talking about years from now.
That’s part of the excitement.
But I know which one I’m still thinking about.
Two battered old boots.
Silver-plated.
One standing.
One fallen.
One apparently trying to move.
One perhaps being dragged behind.
And between them, one lace.
Holding them together.
A pair.
But maybe not quite a pair.
The Divided Self.
It speaks volumes.
I’m just not entirely sure what it’s saying.
And you know something, I’m glad I’m not entirely sure what it’s saying. If I were I’d file it away and forget it. But the way it is I’m not going to forget it. I’m going to go on wondering about it. Maybe try to find out more about it. Watch this space.
See you tomorrow.