Exhibitions Closing This Week
Alastair Gordon: Quodlibet
3 September - 29 September, 2021
The curious, wondrous genre of quodlibet painting, like all trompe l’oeil, hinges on the mechanics of surprise. An initial deception – painting deceives us into believing it is reality rather than painted illusion – gives way to realization of the deception and the ensuing surprise. But it is what follows this momentary confusion and astonishment that matters. That is, how the trompe l’oeil invites an interrogation, one that is above all metaphysical, into questions of truth and reality, the nature of objects as signs, the conditions of artmaking and the limits and potentials of painting as a form of representation. Here, painting is not a window on to the world, but an inquiry into painting which, through the juxtaposition of profundity and banality poses itself as a puzzle. In Jean Baudrillard’s memorable words, it is by ‘outdoing the effect of the real’ that the trompe l’oeil throws ‘radical doubt on the principal of reality’.
On Leaving
2 September - 29 September, 2021
Modern Art is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring: Forrest Bess, Andrew Cranston, Lois Dodd, Andreas Eriksson, Anna-Bella Papp, Eleanor Ray, Carol Rhodes, Frank Walter, Matthew Wong
Sofia Mitsola: Aquamarina: Crocodilian tears
2 September - 2 October, 2021
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Sofia Mitsola, running 2 September – 2 October 2021.
The exhibition is Mitsola’s second solo presentation with the gallery and explores a myth written by the artist, following the adventures of warrior protagonists, sisters Aqua and Marina, in the semiaquatic world they inhabit. The exhibition includes new paintings and charcoal works.
SOPHIE BARBER: HOW MUCH LOVE CAN A LOVE BIRD LOVE, CAN A LOVE BIRD LOVE A LOVE BIRD
3 September - 2 October, 2021
Alison Jacques is delighted to announce ‘How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird’, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sophie Barber (b. 1996, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK) and the artist’s inaugural show at the gallery. The exhibition follows Barber’s solo show at Goldsmiths CCA, London (2020), curated by Sarah McCrory.
Angela Heisch: Burgeon and Remain
2 September - 2 October, 2021
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Burgeon and Remain, the first UK solo exhibition of young New Zealand born, New York based artist Angela Heisch. This body of work, including paintings on a new larger scale, develops the artist’s abstracted visual language with imagery that holds conflicting ideas of stillness and growth. The exhibition will be on view from 3 September to 2 October 2021.
Bridget Riley: Past into Present
3 June - 2 October, 2021
David Zwirner is pleased to present Past into Present, paintings by Bridget Riley (b. 1931), in the gallery’s Grafton Street location in London. The exhibition principally features work by Riley from the last two years, with reference to the work of the past, both in her own practice and in the art of painting itself.
Over the course of her more than six-decade career, Riley has frequently returned to earlier ideas and even to specific works in order to identify alternative directions that a form could take. As she has noted, ‘I am sometimes asked “What is your objective” and this I cannot truthfully answer. I work “from” something rather than “towards” something. It is a process of discovery.’
Jean David Nkot: Etat des Lieux
8 September - 1 October, 2021
Jean-David Nkot draws up a sensual, realistic and wandering mapping of all these human beings led to the unknown by the dramatic situations in their native lands. He draws on the memory of these uprooted people to build a powerful work, filled with emotion and not without poetry for paying tribute to them and testifying. By putting a face on all these exiled persons he restores their dignity and reminds us that the world history has been made of exiles, of migrations, of tragedies, of sufferings but also of hope. In doing so his painting carries within itself some questionings about our societies, about their abilities to resolve conflicts, to face environmental and economic challenges. This artistic commitment gives rise to striking paintings that place humanity at the heart of his aesthetic choices.
– Floréal Duran
Matthew Burrows Selects
9 September - 2 October, 2021
Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is excited to announce yet another great collaboration. “Matthew Burrows Selects” is an exhibit celebrating the renowned and hugely successful Artist Support Pledge and its founder Matthew Burrows MBE.
Matthew Burrows has kindly agreed to make a selection from artists utilising The Artist Support Pledge. We will invite each of the artists to submit works for exhibit here in our west London gallery. We will choose works from the studio of each of the selected artists that will hang alongside the Artist Support Pledge available pieces. Supporting artists is foundational to our organisation, how better to demonstrate than to highlight the amazing initiative of Mathew Burrows OBE -The Artist Support Pledge.
Amalia Pica: A Single Work
3 September - 2 October, 2021
Study for rearranging the conference table evolved from Pica’s 2020 exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, titled Round Table (and other forms). Using generic boardroom furniture as a starting point, Pica created a group of Formica and plywood tables on wheels in her emblematic formal language of geometric shapes and bright colours. These were reconfigured each day in kaleidoscopic arrangements by museum staff, in a joyful performance contrasting the workaday corporate humdrum and staticity of the works’ source of inspiration.
Audun Alvestad: Tan Lines
3 September - 2 October, 2021
Bare pink bodies lounge on candy coloured towels and beneath parasols on the beach, while long water-slides twist through lush tropical landscapes. These latest paintings by Audun Alvestad blur the edges between reality, dream and memory to evoke a complex, sensual expression of summer. Playfully entitled Tan Lines, the artist’s latest exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery explores the season as a feeling rather than a specific place or moment in time, presenting a curious tension between distance and intimacy, indifference and longing.
