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Instead, she shows privately in her own gallery. Selling the work of artists she believes should have a wider audience in London to collectors, Papachristidis—who has a terrific contemporary collection—puts on four or five appointment-only exhibitions a year in what was the ballroom in her l8th-century house in London, once lived in by the future William IV.

“I love art and being a ‘big’ person myself,” she tells me, “I love ‘big’ thinking artists who are not so known here and bringing them to people’s attention here in London.”

Her newest show in this exquisite, white-painted gallery with the original l8th-century architectural details, is work by the Milanese art photographer Maurizio Galimberti.

“I am a camera,” the saturnine Galimberti tells me when we meet to preview his show. And he means this very literally because the camera—or more specifically, his Polaroid—is the tool with which he gets instant results.

But it is what Galimberti does with these images—and he shoots anything he sees on the street in London, New York, Paris and Milan, from taxi cabs to posters—that make them art.

Spatulas are dragged around the Polaroids while still wet, and then the Polaroids are printed onto Arche paper, which Galimberti has previously primed so the vegetable dye of the image becomes a dye-transfer print.

In one of his most successful series, Galimberti breaks down an image—a building such as Tate Modern, or a portrait, such as his study of the actor Johnny Depp—into a grid of Polaroids which, taken at precisely calibrated angles but from the same vantage point, creates enormous contrapuntal tension within the surface of the resulting image. Many of these are of buildings, particularly those of Norman Foster, whom Galimberti admires.

“I take my inspiration, this wish to create movement, from the work of Boccioni [the Italian Futurist whose most famous and typically fragmented work is Materia] and the Dadaists,” he tells me.

And then he demonstrated how he does it. Taking as his subject a torso by the sculptor Igor Mitoraj in Madame Papachristidis’ personal collection, Galemberti traveled his Polaroid down one side of the statue, changing the angle of the camera this way and that with each exposure. He repeated this with the middle section and then with the right hand section, always alternating the angles.

Then he put it together in the order in which he had captured it and the disorientation—the impression that the object had fragmented itself—was complete.

Galimberti says of his work and its intent: “We are all alone; we see the world as individuals, and as individuals, we change across our lifetimes while we are seeing. We are fractured in time and limited in understanding. Life is a moving film for each of us … each of us has a film rolling in our heads. What the film sees, what the camera sees, is a sogno, a dream, different and unique for each of us.”

Another series in this excellent exhibition is a surrealist undertaking using well-known portraits of and by the Surrealists: Galimberti Polaroids them and then, framing and manipulating them, runs a spatula over the still wet vegetable dye of the Polaroid—which is itself partly masking a print of the original image. That of Man Ray’s Violon d’Ingres, for instance, has a postmark on its derriere and spatula manipulations of the upper torso. The result harkens back to certain Surrealist image manipulations of the late l920s.

“I quaderni di Maurizio Galimberti” is viewed by appointment only; telephone Margaret Carnell on (44) (0)7768 764 342.