Amy Winehouse’s Library Has Been Rebuilt, Book by Book, for a London Art Show

One of the artworks in Alex Margo Arden’s new show is a smell: Chanel No. 5, released into the gallery by a custom dispenser. The piece is called Perfume said to have belonged to Amy Winehouse [I–IV], and it’s one of hundreds of stand-ins for the singer’s belongings in Nothing Personal, which opened Friday (Oct. 9) at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in London.

Arden has restaged Winehouse’s personal property across the foundation’s rooms. There are copies of the books in her library, the makeup and perfume she used, the board games and mirrors from around her house, the ballet slippers fans signed and left outside her home after she died, and a birthday card from Mark Ronson and Adele that Winehouse never received.

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None of it is the real thing, and that’s the point. Since 2021, Arden has been studying pixelated pictures of Winehouse found online and in catalogues, newspapers and magazines to work out exactly which objects she needed, then hunting them down. At one point she had 20 versions of the same book so she could match the right spine and cover.

“This show is a really personal insight into Amy,” Arden told ARTnews, calling the works “parallel objects.”

The Fireplace Where She Wrote ‘Back to Black’

For music fans, the room to stand in is Same Otherwise (2026), a re-creation of the fireplace at Winehouse’s home at 2 Jeffrey’s Place, where she wrote her Grammy-winning album Back to Black. Arden has dressed the mantel the way Winehouse had it, with framed issues of British Vogue, pages from Betty and Veronica comics and a mirror carrying a picture of Marilyn Monroe. Where the singer kept photos of friends and family, Arden left gaps. “The gaps speak to the feeling of things being present and missing always,” she said.

Library (2026), the bulk of the five-year hunt, mixes Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory with a cookbook called The New Classic 1000 Recipes, a book on marriage and biographies of Bob Dylan, Carole King, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and David Beckham. Jigsaw (2026) is a stack of puzzles showing the Beatles, The Simpsons and Casablanca, which ARTnews read as a portrait of a patient, introspective Winehouse, far from the party girl of the tabloids. Sent Otherwise (2026) remakes the Ronson and Adele card, which was only discovered years later.

Why It’s ‘Nothing Personal’

This summer marked 15 years since Winehouse died, and her life is still being picked over. That is Arden’s real subject. The foundation says the show looks at how celebrity ownership and death turn everyday objects into “sites of fetishisation and speculation.”

Arden wants the objects read together, not one at a time. “What I’m proposing in the artwork is that as a collection, this gives us really good insight” into Winehouse’s life, she said. She points to a Weight Watchers book on the shelf as the kind of object that could be bent toward an old tabloid story. “In isolation, these objects can be used to really push specific narratives about her,” she said.

The perfume will change during the run. Arden won’t say which scents are coming, though fashion publications have reported over the years that Winehouse also wore Thierry Mugler’s Alien, Vera Wang Princess and Givenchy’s Hot Couture, according to ARTnews.

Arden, a British artist, won the inaugural Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize at Frieze London last year, and her show lands days before Frieze Week 2026 brings the art world back to town. The title track of the album Winehouse wrote by that fireplace is below.

Back to BlackAmy Winehouse · Watch on YouTube ↗

The quietest piece might say the most. Display Identification Cubes (2026) is a thousand acrylic ice cubes that look like the numbered markers museums use to match objects to labels, standing in for everything Arden hasn’t found out about Winehouse and might never find. “They draw attention to spaces where things are absent, but they also mark spaces where things have once been,” she said. Nothing Personal runs until Jan. 23, 2027.