Holly Hendry’s Slackwater emerges as an immense sculptural entanglement that weaves together the watery history of its riverside location above Temple Tube, with references to the abstract rhythms of the Thames and liquid movements within the human body. In conceiving the work, Hendry was drawn to changes in the pattern of the river’s surface; after slackwater, when an incoming tide meets the fluvial flow, water stills, and then eddies – whirlpooling against the main direction of the flow – before pursuing its course upstream.
Archives: Events
events in this category are featured on the home page in the ‘our picks’ section
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Leonor Antunes @ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Leonor Antunes engages with traditions of modernist art, architecture and design through sculpture made and displayed with the specifics of a given place in mind. The forms and materials of her sculptures reference a history of modernism embedded in the work of its less visible protagonists; overlooked, often female, artists and designers.
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Black Venus @ Somerset House
An exhibition that examines the historical representation and shifting legacy of Black women in visual culture. Curated by Aindrea Emelife, BLACK VENUS brings together the work of 18 Black women and non-binary artists to explore the othering, fetishisation, and reclamation of narratives around Black femininity.
BLACK VENUS celebrates and explores the many faces of Black femininity, with over 40 contemporary and primarily photographic artworks. The exhibition mines the complex narratives of Black womanhood through the lens of three archival depictions of Black women: the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel, dating between 1793 to 1930.
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Tai Shani @ Gathering Gallery
Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding With the Angels, is Tai Shani’s new show, which encompasses watercolours, acidic geometries, glass eyes glowing with hunger as well as strained concepts of love, many candles, the sun. (The sun is a ghost here.)
What brings these divergent things together in the precarious cosmology of this situation, is a trip. It would be reductive to describe this trip – seemingly induced by a mushroom known as ergot but not only – as either geographical or psychedelic, wholesome or decadent, because it feels like an actual, on-going transition: from individual need to shared heartbreak, to a depersonalized possibility of life beyond survival.
In her practice, Shani challenges structures of power and political ideology, turning to mythologies, feminist and queer theory, to create experimental strategies in multiple mediums.
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Magdalene Odundo & others @ Two Temple Place
Body Vessel Clay spans 70 years of ceramics, celebrating the medium in new and surprising ways. Beginning with the seminal Nigerian potter, Ladi Kwali, and examining her interaction with 1950s British Studio Pottery, this important new exhibition brings together a rich history with experimental new works by Black women working with clay today.
Artists celebrated in the exhibition include Magdalene Odundo DBE, who worked with Kwali, through Bisila Noha, looking both backwards and forwards, and into a striking contemporary display from Phoebe Collings-James, Shawanda Corbett, Chinasa Vivian Ezhuga, Jade Montserrat and Julia Phillips.
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Jutta Koether @ Levy Gorvy
Jutta Koether’s Femme Colonne, features seven new, large-scale paintings, spread across two gallery sites. Koether utilises appropriation to situate herself within an eclectic artistic genealogy that references idioms from French baroque painting to Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, and Surrealism. In a recurring repertoire of pixelated or “bruised” grids, vibrant red paint, and unfurling ribbons and curtains, Koether layers her own figuration with art historical motifs, recasting these symbols to provoke generative new meanings. -
Annie Morris @ Timothy Taylor Gallery
A new selection of sculptures, drawings and tapestries by Annie Morris. The exhibition coincides with Morris’s first solo museum exhibition in the UK, When A Happy Thing Falls at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and her inclusion in Frieze Sculpture 2021.
Morris’s sculptures, drawings and tapestries draw upon the artist’s memories, experiences and the subconscious. Colour plays an important role across her practice, linking her sculptures to her drawing and tapestry work through a shared palette in rich shades of cobalt blue, burgundy, mustard yellow and earthy green.
The exhibition presents a selection of paired sculptures from the artist’s Stack series, each linked by form and shape into pairs.
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Louise Bourgeois & others @ Cromwell Place Gallery
This exhibition, Body Topographies, brings together five influential female artists whose work offers a nuanced understanding of the female gaze. It spans multiple generations and continents, and presents work by Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010, Paris, France), Heidi Bucher (1926- 1993, Winterthur, Switzerland), Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Malaysia), Adriana Varejão (b. 1964, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile). Each artist engages with the body, rendering it in ways that are abstract, conceptual, political, and at times surreal.
Body Topographies presents varied depictions of the body that engage complex themes including colonialism, anthropology, personal and shared history, sexuality, pain, familial relationships, and identity.
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Yoko Ono @ Whitechapel
Mend carefully.
Think of mending the world
at the same time. y.o.MEND PIECE for London draws on the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with precious metals such as gold and silver. The process nurtures breakage as an important part of an object’s history, rather than seeking to disguise it. In this artwork, the physical act of repair becomes a timely metaphor for a different kind of mending which takes place in the mind and through community.
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Tacita Dean @ Frith Street Gallery
An exhibition of new work by Tacita Dean at two locations.
At the Golden Square gallery, the ground floor features works relating to Dean’s forthcoming designs for The Dante Project, a new commission by The Royal Ballet, based on Dante Alighieri’s 1320 longform narrative poem The Divine Comedy. Dean’s sets move from the stark black-and-white negative backdrop for Inferno, through the strange, transitional state of Purgatorio before emerging into a celebration of colour in Paradiso, the final act.
In the lower gallery, Dean shows a new film called One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting. The 50-minute 16mm film takes the form of a conversation between the artists Julie Mehretu and the late Luchita Hurtado, as they both shared a birthday.