Not by any means exclusive, this is a roundup of the shows we have managed to see that seem to speak to the idea of collecting instead of gifting for Christmas.
Always gifting us the opportunity to discover new names, Flowers Gallery’s 42nd edition of their Small is Beautiful exhibition showcases the creative freedom found in a fixed economy of scale. Featuring over 100 artists, established and emerging, we encounter the works as a totality in the jagged democracy of a horizon line hang. Each contributing two works measuring no more than 7 x 9 inches; part of the joy in this exhibition is walking the line and stopping at points of discovery. This year, I was too late to bid on a wondrous little yellow bird, a photographic collage ‘Pimpelmees’ (2023), by Julie Cockburn (get on the wait list), or Joseph Dupre’s ceramic dove ‘Somnolent Echoings’ (2024), or Emma Turpin’s winter scenes. However, there is still so much to consider – like Jane Edden’s ‘Cicada Horse’ (2024) and, unbelievably, Maggi Hambling’s ‘Ice Cap Melting’, (2021), though slightly out of my budget – an ideal winter investment.
IMAGE: ‘Logical Absurdity’ Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Tin Man Art Tin Man Art
The latest exhibition from a 30-year artistic collaboration between Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, ‘Logical Absurdity’, is a taster ahead of next year’s museum show ‘This is What you Get’ at the Ashmolean, Oxford, a showcase to the vast archive of visual material made in tandem to Radiohead’s albums, and beyond. The focus for their exhibition with Tin Man Art is a series of paintings that began as cover art for A Light for Attracting Attention (2022), the debut album from Yorke’s rock band The Smile. First conceived in a mixture of gouache, tempera and powdered mushroom on canvas and later made into tapestries, these images represent a departure from previous subject matter that expressed a darkening anxiety about our insidious relationship with technology. Loosely in the genre of landscape, uplifting in nature, these tapestries (GOOM THREADS, 2024; YOU’LL BE THERE IN STITCHES, 2024; and THREADED MEMBRANES, 2024) have the quality of maps. Some are encoded with signs and symbols drawn from lyrics: eyes peeking from mountain tops, zig-zagging ultramarine waves coruscating through rivers into reverberating lakes. It is a sensational option for a winter gift, with the added benefit of warming drafty rooms.
IMAGE ‘Encounters’ Heather Chontos at The Finch Project, Fitzrovia The Finch Project Encounters Heather Chontos at The Finch Project, Fitzrovia
Returning to London for the first time in over a decade, Heather Chontos brings us much-needed joy and brightness from her recent works, which were made for Encounters at The Finch Project. Colours hover, suspended in interlocking arrangements of subtly varying texture. In her catalogue essay, Katy Kim says these works “serve as an allegory for her life. A composite of the parts, both chaos and balance. Her paintings tell the viewer to look closer, to explore deep within yourself.” Born in New York in 1978, Chontos is the daughter of an antique collector and carpenter and presently works inside a renovation project in Portugal, somewhere on the border of Spain. Her resourcefulness is both manifest in the work and gives the viewer a sense of its possibility, they are affirmative without needing to be – or say – anything else. The painter Phillip Hunt recalls, “My first impression of Heather Chontos’s paintings was quite removed. I found them… light. Then, after spending a little more time with them, I realised that the lightness was the substance. It is not an easy thing to crack – they elevate just slightly above the ground. Hovering. She has it.” A beautiful, sensual gift for this season
IMAGE: EM KETTNER The Foundling in the Old Growth, 2024 Pipeline contemporary Give Me an Inch Rachel Clancy | Lexia Hachtmann | Grace Kalyta | Em Kettner | Gabriel Kidd | JD Rooney
Disclosure – I love everything about this gallerist Tatiana Cheneviere and her curation. Every time I visit the space with a room at the back to prefigure work for the forthcoming show (hence in the pipeline), I learn something – not just about art, but about life. This idea of being in conversation with art and the world is relevant to her current group show, Give Me an Inch. Showcasing the work of six artists on the subject of entry points, the exhibition “looks into the power dynamics between the artist and their audience, the teller and the tale,” says Cheneviere, “and how only a hint is needed to delve into the deeper context of a practice.” We do this with all of the works, but Em Kettner’s story stays with me, not in the least because the works are unusually displayed at wheelchair height. One cannot appreciate them in passing; a step up and into the picture is required, so we occupy another vantage point and see through another’s eyes what the world might look or feel like. The fact that this is a theatrical device, and that yes – you can step back – is reinforced by her large, handmade mahogany frames surrounding the delicate works on paper. In
The Watchman, 2024, the frame shrinks away where the light from a doctor’s headlamp is shining, embodying how we are imprinted by how others perceive us.
In the pipeline for January is a dual presentation of works by Gabriel Kidd & Matilda Sutton
IMAGE: Atalanta Xanthe ‘Age Gap: 1494-2024’ ALICE BLACK Atalanta Xanthe ‘Age Gap: 1494-2024’
Xanthe’s latest series, Age Gap: 1494-2024, consists of 20 small-scale paintings and accompanying drawings, born out of a fictional collaboration between Xanthe and 15th-century illuminator Stephan Schriber, whose unfinished sketchbook she discovered at the Bavarian State Library, Germany. Using the medieval prayer book ‘Book of Hours as both a visual and conceptual foundation, the artist invokes surreal dreamscapes of women in that liminal state of lacking agency. Traditionally read by women in private chambers, these manuscripts were popular between the 13th and 16th centuries (300 years!). Likely, their enduring power had something to do with the evolution of women’s independence, the only physical asset a woman could legally hold during this time. Cleverly, she uses these illuminated images as decorative borders, which flourish around a central image drawn from marginal characters found in other sourcebooks (Morgan Library, New York (USA) and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK)). Reimagined as predominant rather than peripheral, Xanthe illustrates her thesis: that what we hold most dear is often stored privately in our imaginations – be it art, a lover or simply an ancient manuscript we happen to find, like a prayer book.
IMAGE: Maria Szakats at Brooke Bennington Maria Szakats ‘Romance Apocalypse’
Suppose you want to swerve the traditional gift for your lover. Why not head over to Brooke Bennington for ‘Romance Apocalypse’, a solo exhibition by Maria Szakats of simultaneously fuzzy and vibrant works in mohair embroidered on cotton toile? Swirling with strange layers of ambiguity and softly nuanced with the peculiar intimacy between two people, Szakats was inspired to name the show after the slogan on a t-shirt her partner gifted her. Fully of irony and bluff, this perfectly formed selection of works balances emotional warmth with questions about how we consume love. Not only based on her personal experience, Szakats draws out questions posed by the theorist Eva Illouz (thank you, I will be getting this book too!) in ‘Consuming the Romantic Utopia’. In this, the artist invites us to consider the pressure of romantic ideals imposed by a consumer-driven society. I cannot get the twist of ‘AGNES III’, 2024, out of my mind; love is a thing that floats on desire.
IMAGE – Aldo van den Broek and Johnny Mae Hauser, HOMECOMING GALLERY Homecoming Gallery, ‘Postpartum Garden’
When the Homecoming Gallery comes to London, they bring all the best things from Amsterdam with them, in this case, the partners in life and art, Aldo van den Broek and Johnny Mae Hauser. A selection of their works in conversation, entitled ‘Postpartum Garden’ briefly appeared at the Penthouse at Park Modern, Hyde Park, and co-curated with Brandei Estes. Made in tandem after the birth of their son, living and working as a new family, what emerged were two profoundly separate yet somehow interconnected bodies of work, reflecting the strange isolation and divergence of parenthood. Works made by the father, van den Broek, are complete of structural heft and largely monochromatic, as if painted in the shadows, waiting for something to emerge. Strong and steely, they are also mysteriously lonesome, as if something or someone has been left out. By contrast, works made by the mother, Hauser, are blurry and abstract; they leave us searching for nouns and reaching for blooms of wild colour. There is a maternal softness, a sweetness of breath. Her series ‘Die Welle’ somehow captures the ravishing dissolution of self that follows the birth of a child. Though presenting works as different as their biology, what both artists share is a heightened state of observation of the self and the home. We are gifted with a visual truth of parenthood by opening the window into their respective creative experiences. Brave and illuminating, I cannot wait to see what these artists do next.
IMAGE: Rebecca Partridge: Wildflowers, Night: Fairy Flower, 2024 White Conduit Project – ‘Say It With Flowers’
This show is charming and disarming – showing works by John Peter Askew, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Gordon Cheung, Tania Kovats, Sophie Layton, Sarah Lederman, Lana Locke, William Mackrell, Hannah Maybank, Jiro Osuga, Rebecca Partridge, and Tomoko Yoneda, co-curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Yuki Miyake. Upon arrival, Carey-Kent jokingly pointed to the diptych that might especially interest me, “It represents the menopause?” but my eyes were drawn to a miniature work on the left by Rebecca Partridge: ‘Wildflowers, Night: Fairy Flower”, 2024. Also, a writer, Carey-Kent, has diligently written a paragraph from every artist in this show, elegantly distilling their essence whilst weaving in his selection rationale. “…Partridge is interested in time sequences and different times of day: in line with that, her practice includes expansive skyscapes on a large scale and flower clusters compressed into just 17 x 13 cm- and seen at night. Partridge uses her photographs to set out the structure, but the results aren’t photorealistic: they land halfway between what you can see and what you can’t see but know is there. As such, they beautifully encapsulate the philosophical question of how much our apparent knowledge of the world is an objective reality and how much comes from the assumptions and perceptual mechanisms we bring.” If Carey-Kent tries to tell us something important in this show, he is bringing it with flowers.
IMAGE: ‘An eXhibition of SMALL things with BIG ideas’ curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Yuki Miyake ‘An eXhibition of SMALL things with BIG ideas’ curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Yuki Miyake
We are often reminded that good things come in small packages this time of year. Further, economies of scale often lead to a distillation of the best elements. This third edition of ‘An eXhibition of SMALL things with BIG ideas’ curated by Paul Carey-kent and Yuki Miyake exploits our love of small-scale objects to introduce us big thoughts that surprise, provoke, and make us think.
Viewing a wall entire of small works like these is very intimate. My attention landed on something I recognised: the work of Geraldine Swayne. The Sussex-based painter known best for her vivid miniatures in enamel on metal or large hyperfigurative work on canvas has painted glass for these shimmering little pieces to encourage “peering” into and through the work. They suggest movement, or perhaps that is the light bouncing, which is interesting given she also works with moving image and sound – a member of the seminal Krautrock group Faust. Paul Carey Kent, who curated this show, says, “The alla prima, ‘paint as paint’ quality of her work, is emphasised by abstract passages and semi-accidental effects… The alluring, painterly qualities of the painted surface also cause her images to further depart from ‘normality’, which makes for an unsettling undertone, uncannily appropriate for times in which people go about their daily business vaguely aware, without grasping it fully, that the very condition of daily business is under threat.” Like most works in this show, they are excellent value – better than a night out and longer lasting.
IMAGE: Marilyn Hallam, Blackbird Rook x Paul Smith Art Space BLACKBIRD ROOK X PAUL SMITH ART SPACE
Marilyn Hallam should be better known, says Katie Heller, and rightly so. Her luminous paintings sing with delicate washes of colour and invite you through windows, past doorways, and into airy interior scenes. They suggest a kind of daydreaming freedom of the wandering mind. In an interview with Mali Morris for Turps Magazine, 2021, she sai,d “…It was important for me to keep the painting open and revealed – no obliteration, covering over or opacity, but keeping some sort of dynamic relationship with the ground colours.” Born in Yorkshire in 1947, she studied fine art at the University of Reading, where she met and married the painter Clyde Hopkins. Over five decades, Hallam painted thoughtful, quiet interiors shot with spring light. Compositions that begin with layers of drawing, tracing, collaging, and reconstruction are then infused with a palette redolent to Bonnard. They are, quite simply, sublime. “That is what intrigues me,” says Mali Morris, “how her search leads to resolution, her preparation to realisation. The completed paintings are airy, with light flowing through them, and for all their complexity, they are vividly direct, immediately radiant.”
Top Photo: FLOWERS GALLERY Small is Beautiful 42nd Edition Flowers Gallery, Cork Street ‘Small is Beautiful’ 21 November 2024 – 4 January 2025