LONDON.- Blain|Southern presents The Curious Image, the first solo exhibition in the UK by the celebrated Dutch artist and designer Jeroen Verhoeven. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Lectori Salutem,a monumental creation made from highly-polished steel. While ostensibly a desk, its flowing contours and reflective surfaces play smoke and mirrors with the eye; from some aspects it looks like a machine, from others an object of hand-crafted beauty.Like Verhoeven’s earlier Cinderella Table, 2005, which is now in the permanent collection of both the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the work combines highly skilled craftsmanship with complex industrial processes. One side of the desk seems to have been spliced in two, exposing the beauty of the engineering within. When the work is viewed from certain angles, two silhouettes can be seen, depicting Verhoeven’s twin brother