For 72 hours, London’s art scene became one vast, twitching organism. From Mayfair’s white spaces to Peckham’s railway arches dripping with condensation, every gallery door swung open in ragged synchrony. This wasn’t just an open house – it was the city taking its pulse.
Nico Kos Earle stalked these spaces with a critic’s eye and a flâneur’s instincts. What emerged wasn’t a coherent narrative, but something better – London’s art world caught mid-gesture, makeup smudged, arguing with itself about the meaning of life while the bar ran dry. The real exhibition was the city itself.
‘Base Materialism’ at Albion Jeune Gallery in Fitzrovia – the younger sibling of Albion Barn – is a group exhibition that creates a space for the inexplicable and the repressed. Drawing its title from French thinker Georges Bataille, this show gives form to his radical concept that “truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction” and that what we bury within ourselves continues to exert a persistent, throbbing presence. In Story of the Eye, Bataille explored the instability of base matter, using it to disrupt traditional hierarchies of beauty and form, and famously asserted, “Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror.” This exhibition channels that ethos, seducing viewers with the sparkling and visceral before delivering a gut punch—challenging and perhaps even liberating a guarded heart from its old constraints.
Featuring seven international artists, this show is anchored by an iron rail, which hosts Fin Simonetti’s playful sculptures that amplify our inclination towards cuteness and fetishisation. Ambera Wellmann slays us (and Francis Bacon) with her provocative, bestial painting ‘You Burn Me’; this livid, fleshy rawness is scaled up in Ivana Bašić mixed media wall works, uncompromising in form and dripping in unctuous bodily references. Elegantly suspended in the gallery, like portals into a medieval netherworld, Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s pair of ‘Emperor’s Clothes’ – in graphite, silk and shaped birch – is like a masterclass for curation in small spaces. Meanwhile, Rachel Rossin shows us what a painting looks like when your references have been generated – her works capture the essence of transhumanism. Shuyi Cao’s sculptural works tip us into the magical, using found, fragile natural elements like shells and twigs; whilst slightly at odds with the rest, they offer a welcome respite, but it was Shuo Hao who stole my heart, with paintings that express the euphoria of love with the intuitive flare of a natural colourist. A must-see lineup of fearless creatives who embrace what we seek to repress—the erotic, death, excess—they enact Bataille’s Call to confront the base as fundamental to reimagining the future.
https://www.brookebenington.com/exhibitions/53-best-self-curated-by-polly-morgan.-featuring-juno-calypso-mat/cover/
There are so many good things about ‘Best Self’ at Brooke Bennington in Fitzrovia, curated by artist Polly Morgan – who is already familiar with the shedding and stuffing of skin through a practice that incorporates taxidermy—unanimously voted one of the best group offerings during London Gallery Weekend, this punchy, relevant and uncompromising exhibition – with a capital E – features masterworks by Juno Calypso, Mat Collishaw, Christopher Opage, Boo Saville, Julia Thompson, Bengt Tibert and course Polly Morgan.
Follow Erving Goffman’s warning, ‘Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts as a mask may become your face’ (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). These artists shine eerie lights on our cultural obsession with image and our compulsive avoidance strategies. Playfully, they ask, ‘How many selves do we have, and would friendship blossom if they met? Perhaps Best Self would admire the bravery of Make-up-free Self and praise her ‘courage’? The lurking Self might complement the Public Self for ‘putting it out there’ as the Masochist Self basks in the heat of the Hot Self’s disdain.’
Oh boy, was I glad to see this after a dismal brush with a tech bro, jumping up on steroids, holding court over lunch at a members club (one of the organisers of a US fair imported on some soft power agenda), pontificating on the ‘wrongs of the feminist thing’ (‘What is that word beginning with m?’ he stalled, and the poor bewildered (brainwashed?) assistant offered ‘manifesto!’) which was apparently ‘anti-women’ (except he could not explain why) before launching into a catalogue of the awful ‘older women’ he dated ‘who don’t look after themselves’ and finishing with an outline of the ‘nice, young, submissive’ girl he was ‘holding out for’. (!!!) Actually.
What sort of bonkers echo chamber does this guy inhabit where he thinks it’s ok to spout this reptilian crap in public, in London, and get away with it? I felt as I looked at Juno Calypso’s insanely clever work – of a woman looking into five mirrors – her blank masked face looking back at me. Polly Morgan’s wall-mounted sculpture ‘Here Lies Our World’ – a pixelating iPhone with miniature snakes in the lens – offered the cause. As Morgan’s catalogue essay states, “Fiction thinks estrangement is a more likely outcome. Young Self Dorian Gray stabs the portrait of the Aged Self and takes his own life in the process. Worst Self Elisabeth’s binge-eating repulses best Self Sue in The Substance and keeps her locked in a cupboard.” Beware!
https://cadogangallery.com/exhibitions/112-deborah-tarr-rare-earth/
If you are anywhere near Cadogan Gallery in Knightsbridge, be sure to see the museum-level show ‘Rare Earth’ by master painter Deborah Tarr. A selection of small and medium-sized oil paintings in rich, earthy tones, set in found or antique frames, is balanced with three large-scale paintings. Redolent of the purity and non-geometric abstraction of the Tachiste painters in post-1945 Paris, particularly Nicolas de Staël, or the Abstract Expressionists of post-war America, Tarr’s inimitable blend of abstraction and figuration is less about personal expression and more like a meditation on the essential character of the place. We can see that Tarr spends time in wide open spaces or near the water (in Cornwall); like the sea-worn shapes found on coastal verges, we simultaneously perceive a presence – rocks are resolutely there – and their dissolution.
Painting scenes through the slippage of memory (while also marking the passage of time with each considered stroke), her works somehow capture that mesmerising space between what is perceived and what is felt – they are sensational. In studied, painterly gestures, she draws from elemental forces— seasonal weather patterns, lunar cycles, and the endless motion of the sea – in an interplay of figuration and abstraction. Through this, she delves into the nitty-gritty character of a scene, distilling landscape to line and shape, and offers us glimpses of the sublime (in the true sense of being in awe of nature). We swing from the hefty horizontals in ‘The Archaic Landscape’ to the lightness of being in ‘Detachment’. For this, she reflects the oppositional forces of the natural world: turbulent and still, powerful and fragile, night and day. We see forms balanced with deliberate brushstrokes and dynamic compositions, and find harmony in her earthy, harmonious palette. We feel anchored by these paintings – as the elegant press release states: “Her compositions possess a quiet gravity; organic forms appear at once essential and timeless, imbued with a quiet, restorative force.” To me, Tarr’s paintings are like hymns – unforgettable, ecstatic melodies that live in their own time and offer moments of transcendence.
This group show takes its lead from a vibey, upbeat Talking Heads song ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ – (‘Years ago I was an angry young man/ There was a shopping mall/ Now, it’s all covered with flowers/ We used to microwave/ Now we just eat nuts and berries.’) – that envisages a post-Anthropocene world. Works included by Adham Faramawy, Cecilia Fiona, and Jen O’Farrell were selected to “evoke a world where the boundaries between bodies, species and landscapes are porous, shifting and in constant negotiation.” Fitting then that I had come to see a performance conceived by the artist Cecelia Fiona, whom I had only seen online, at the opening of her sensational ‘Ghost Flower Ritual’ (Feel Yourself Becoming Nature Again) at Copenhagen Contemporary in collaboration with the composer Sophie Soesmeyer.
Fiona’s expansive practice, encompassing painting, sculpture, and performance, is shaped around a sense of entanglement – how our identities are interwoven with the wild and fantastical. What drew me to her work initially was a wildflower colour palette drawn through visual archetypes that stem from folklore and forms of enchantment. Whilst she is world-building through costumes, paintings and sculptures, everything she makes – in soft, blooming colours – expresses a deep interconnectedness to the natural world and her profound love. On entering the gallery space to see part of the three-hour performance, ‘Harvested, gathered, carried (the life of souls)’, the lack of any orchestration struck me, then immediately attuned to the soft brush of a dancer’s bare feet, tracing their way across the floor in purposeful, balletic arcs. Dressed in a work by the artist, the word that came to mind was semiotics, which is typically something we encounter and study in theatre, relating to how a set design amplifies the themes of the play. I wish there were more of this (“A Leap of Sympathy” by Anna Perach at Richard Saltoun Gallery was a sell-out). On the edges, watching was one of my favourite performance artists – Echo Morgan – and a cherished curator – Marcelle Joseph. Was this a coincidence, or was this a special form of entanglement, having all been inspired by what we had previously seen on the interweb that led us all to converge in this place at the same time? Moments of unchoreographed magic like this in the art world nourish me for days.
https://sxswlondonarts.com/ldn-lab/#hearth
The team planning SXSW London has consistently used the word convergence as a touchstone from the start. “Convergence is a dynamic concept that brings together different people, ideas, and conditions in what can be either a soft blending or a violent collision,” says Beth Greenacre, Visual Arts Advisor and curator of Beautiful Collisions, one of three exhibitions across the first iteration of SXSW in East London. It is a strangely AI term and slightly ironic, given the controversy that surrounded this fair, which originated in Austin, Texas, due to its US Army sponsorship and Defence Industry Ties (60 acts, including all Irish musicians, cancelled their performances last year). The fair has since revised its sponsorship model, but perhaps not all the tech bros have taken note…
We were standing in the Nicholas Hawksmoor Church at Spitalfields, a Baroque ecclesiastical masterpiece built as one of the churches under the New Churches in London and Westminster Act of 1710. Beautiful Collisions brings together contemporary artists Alberta Whittle, Alvaro Barrington, Denzil Forrester, Runkus, Tavares Strachan, and Zinzi Minott, whose work reflects the significant impact of artists from the Caribbean diaspora on British art and culture. This show holds space for buried histories. Being in a site of worship, we are reminded how imagery has been used as propaganda (by religion and governments) since the beginning of civilisation and how vital the role of the curator can be (its original meaning’ curer of souls’). Forrester’s altarpiece painting, Congregation, showing an abstracted dancing crowd converging around a DJ, triggered a Faithless earworm: God is a DJ and formative London memories at the WAG. So often in culture, you hear it before you see it.
Greenacre suggested I check out LDN LAB at Protein Studios, conceived and curated by Alex Poots and produced by North Star Studio. The first room was a welcome palette cleanse; Andy Warhol’s highly influential Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) film works, Salvador Dali [ST67], 1966 and Nico [ST238], 1966 (16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 3.7 minutes at 16 frames per second), courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum. What happened to the days when seeing moving images felt truly intimate and luxurious – there was a languorous, human pace to these vignettes. Following this, we discover Beeple’s Tardis, otherwise called Tree of Knowledge, which is so evident and explicit in the way it engaged with technology that it was simultaneously impressive and impenetrable. In the next room, a theoretical conversation was taking place between Marina Abramovic and Hans Ulrich Obrist, who simultaneously asked the artist and her avatar about her practice, which was also a learning experience for her. My stomach lurched. “Oh heavens”, I silently prayed, “Save us from an infinity of megastars talking about themselves.”
5. The Call Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst – (See Top Photo)
I was saved by The Call, next door —a phenomenal, immersive, theatrical, and frankly holy installation by the collaborative artist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. At the end of a dark room lined with speakers was a luminous sculpture with the bilateral symmetry of a church organ. I will try to describe it. A graduated sequence of carved white panels with gilded reliefs was suspended at an angle over grids of whirling fans in clusters of six, making up twelve per section. This configuration expanded in both directions from a central copper plate etching, outlining the features of a young boy playing the lyre, like the giant wings of an angel. Walking towards it, I was immersed in the strange harmonies of a part-human, part-AI chorus, and I stopped at a small podium holding the score. The imagery was mesmeric, the sounds euphoric, and this was the closest I came to a sense of the spiritual that day. Machines do not have ghosts; we are the angels that need to train them, not for our sole purpose, but for the safety of all the living beings in this world, not in the least our actual planet.
The Call (perfect title!) originated as a commission for the Serpentine Gallery. Herndon and Dryhurst highlight the importance of collaboration and transparency in their creative process, often working with other artists, technologists, and thinkers to produce their work, and always honouring them. They describe their studio as “countless communication channels” with multiple projects running simultaneously. More incubators than traditional studios, they welcome complexity and the intensity of collaboration as a means to release the unexpected, the accidental and the new. With regards to the use of AI, they use it as a tool to “explore collective accomplishment and coordination”. By positioning this as part of a lineage that goes back to the ritual of hymns and religious protocols, to me, they seem to be asking the most critical question: who is responsible for writing the code – in other words, the Ten Commandments – and how will this shape our future?
The room was rammed full of super fans for Cornelia Parker’s talk at her solo exhibition, History Painting, at Frith Street Gallery. Parker explained how she created this new series of paintings and why she had turned her attention to pigments, in particular, how ancient materials like dinosaur fossils hold colour and what it means when we pulverise – or explode – them (destruction is a huge theme for the artist). Refreshingly low-key, she explained that since she was no longer living with a painter, she could give it a try. As ever, there was so much more to her process, which is wildly generative and masterfully informed. Her starting point was the discovery of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s pioneering 1902 volume Colour Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Colour. This “extraordinary” volume presented colour analysis in a way that appealed across disciplines, breaking down key theories in a series of experimental and visually striking illustrations that were easy to understand. While it was underappreciated in its time, her expression of colour anticipated significant developments in modern art by nearly half a century, inspiring abstract artists like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. So why has art history forgotten her? Parker is setting that right.
https://www.frithstreetgallery.com/exhibitions/235-cornelia-parker-history-painting/
Around the room, seemingly abstract oil-on-canvas works inspired by historic newspaper covers and the colour analysis charts of American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939), as well as pieces on glass created from home-made pigments produced from objects she has used over decades of her practice. Notably, she generated each pixelation using an AI tool that extracted the palette from found newspaper images, which we understand only from the titles she gives. It is an excellent form of elision, one that simultaneously speaks to Vanderpoel’s figurative absence from the colour theory canon whilst calling our attention to the very real overwhelm of shock imagery in current events. We are so bombarded with horrific images of starving, emaciated children, pawns in a warmonger’s game that we are numb and look away. Here we look, and then we think: it’s time to act.
‘Until our attention is called to it, we are unconscious of what unpromising material may yield new and beautiful motives for colour harmonies.’ – Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, 1902
London Gallery Weekend Nico Kos Earle – June 2025 Words/Photos Nico Kos Earle © Artlyst 2025