Alex Margo Arden Gets Up Close and Personal With Amy Winehouse’s Items for an Exhibition in London

This summer marked 15 years since the death of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, but her spirit lives on. Now, her life and influence are the subject of “Nothing Personal,” a just-opened exhibition by artist Alex Margo Arden spread across three rooms of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in London.

For the exhibition, Arden has created hundreds of simulacra of Winehouse’s personal items, recreating a pair of ballet slippers signed by fans left outside the singer’s home after her death and a birthday card from the music producer Mark Ronson and Adele that Winehouse never received. To round out this display, Arden purchased exact copies of books found in Winehouse’s library, the makeup and perfume she used, and boardgames and decorative items like mirrors that dotted her house. The display can at times feel like you’re surreptitiously browsing the most intimate parts of someone’s home. Since 2021, Arden has been forensically dissecting pixelated images of Winehouse she’s found online, in catalogues, newspapers and magazines, to determine which items she would need to track down.

“This show is a really personal insight into Amy,” Arden told ARTnews, describing what’s on view as “parallel objects.” She feels that the hundred books on display create an intimate atmosphere and add historical value, more so than if she actually had presented just one or two authentic items from Winehouse’s estate.

The sensitivity to detail across the project is striking. At one point during this five-year scavenger hunt, Arden wound up with 20 versions of the same book; she wanted to compare each copy’s spine and cover to make sure she had the correct one. The bulk of this labor is showcased in Library (2026), containing dozens of tomes from Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory next to the cookbook The New Classic 1000 Recipes, which is not far from a book on marriage. There are also biographies of David Beckham, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn.

“What I’m proposing in the artwork is that as a collection, this gives us really good insight” into Winehouse’s life, Arden said, warning against zeroing in on any one book. She pointed to a Weight Watchers book, which some might relate to Winehouse’s history of eating disorders, which were put under a microscope by the British tabloids. “In isolation, these objects can be used to really push specific narratives about her,” she explained.

In the next room, Arden presents Same Otherwise (2026), a recreation of the fireplace in Winehouse’s home at 2 Jeffrey’s Place, where she wrote her Grammy Award–winning album Back to Black. Just as Winehouse once had it, Arden has positioned framed issues of British Vogue, comic book pages from Betty and Veronica, and a mirror with a picture of Marilyn Monroe over the mantel. But the artist has left gaps where the musician had personal photos of friends and family framed. “The gaps speak to the feeling of things being present and missing always,” she said.

As we spoke, I became captivated by a scent in the gallery. At first I thought it was Arden’s perfume, but the fragrance was, in fact, an artwork, Perfume said to have belonged to Amy Winehouse [I-IV] (2024–26). The Chanel No.5 I was smelling had been emitted from a custom dispenser by Arden. Throughout the exhibition’s run, the Chanel No.5 will be exchanged for other perfumes that Winehouse is said to have worn. Arden wouldn’t disclose which ones would feature, but various accounts by fashion publications previously reported that Winehouse also wore Alien by Thierry Mugler, Vera Wang Princess, and Givenchy’s Hot Couture. The work was a touching reminder of Winehouse’s tangible presence, wafting through the galleries.

The exhibition also includes more intimate works that at times get overshadowed. Jigsaw (2026), for example, is a stack of those titular puzzles of scenes of the Beatles, The Simpsons, and Casablanca. The patience required to piece them together paints Winehouse as an introspective woman as opposed to her party girl that the tabloids portrayed her as. Sent Otherwise (2026) is the recreation of the aforementioned birthday card that was only discovered years later, a poignant reminder that even a decade and a half after Winehouse’s death, her life is still being excavated. Taken together, they act as clever tidbits into Winehouse’s short-lived life.

To her tribute to Winehouse, Arden also adds a piece of herself, via Display Identification Cubes (2026), an artwork made up of a thousand acrylic ice cubes that resemble the placards that are typically used in museum vitrines to match an object to its corresponding label. This numbering methodology recurs across Arden’s oeuvre. In All Clear (2022), these numbers appear as print-outs affixed next to items such as a broom, a ladder, and a woven basket, perhaps evoking the objects found at a crime scene, the mundane taking on a more sinister connotation.

But in “Nothing Personal,” on view through January 23, the plastic numbers serve as pieces that Arden hasn’t discovered about Winehouse yet—and maybe never will. “They draw attention to spaces where things are absent, but they also mark spaces where things have once been,” she said.