How a Psychologist Uses Art to Read Mood, Identity, and Relationships
For Dr. Dimitrios Tsivrikos, a psychologist at University College London, collecting is not a side interest. It is a way of thinking. In his London home, art functions as both a personal environment and a working theory: that the objects around us shape how we feel, how we behave, and even how we understand one another.
Raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, and later educated in London, Tsivrikos earned his PhD and built an academic career at UCL. He also spent years moving through the city’s art schools, studios, openings, and galleries, close enough to the scene to absorb its language, but not, as he puts it, as an artist himself. Collecting became his way of remaining near the creativity he admired, while turning that proximity into a broader mission: supporting artists and widening access to art.
The result is a home collection that changes with the room. Tsivrikos regularly rotates the works on view, allowing different pairings to alter the mood of the space. Charlotte Colbert, Pablo Picasso, and Ju Young Kim can be seen in one kind of conversation; Tristan Pigott, David Hockney, and Tai-Shan Schierenberg in another. Holly Hendry introduces a biological note, while Vietnam-born artist KV Duong’s latex paintings bring a sharper surface tension through their engagement with queer identity politics.
That shifting dialogue is central to Tsivrikos’s thinking. He describes curation as a form of applied psychology, informed not only by his master’s degree in curation, but also by his professional understanding of how environment shapes identity and behavior. In his view, works do not simply hang in a room. They alter one another, and they alter the people living with them.
The same logic underpins The TAGLI, the London-based gallery and advisory he founded. Its name comes from Lucio Fontana’s notion of tagli, or cuts, the slashes that opened new spatial possibilities on canvas. Tsivrikos sees that gesture as a useful metaphor for art itself: something that interrupts habit, creates depth, and changes perspective.
Asked what he values most, he is clear that art is not primarily a financial asset. It is cultural and emotional first. That belief also informs his advice to anyone curious about another person, or about their own response to art: go on a museum date. The way someone describes a work, he says, can reveal how they think, what they notice, and what they feel.
The work he returns to most often is Ken Currie’s *Resurrection*. Small enough to sit within the scale of his torso, the painting shows two blue, disembodied gloves descending into the picture plane. Tsivrikos reads the image as ambiguous and strangely consoling, a scene of intervention without fixed identity. For him, that uncertainty is the point. Art, at its best, does not close meaning down. It opens it up.
