Last Chance – Exhibitions to See This Weekend
Ryan Mosley: Three Corner Field
15 October - 13 November, 2021
Over the past 15 years, Mosley has become well known for paintings that call freely to thousands of years of art-historical characterisation, from Greek antiquity to Flemish court painting, Commedia dell’arte and Victorian Aestheticism. Clowns, camels and dandys commingle on the artist’s canvases, and signs mutate as they repeat. In 4th-century Hellenic statuary a lady’s hair scraped up and back into an ovoid bun meant we were looking at Persephone; here she’s a dancer keeping strands from her face, or an actress casually showcasing her cheekbones, or an old maid who can’t make the effort. Mosley puts formal elements in all states of being, keeping all combinations alive.
Florian Krewer: ride of fly
10 September - 13 November, 2021
Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present ride or fly, an exhibition of new paintings by Florian Krewer.
The figures in Krewer’s paintings couple and live out their desires in artificial landscapes or night scenes. They commune with birds and wild animals who inhabit their spaces, bodies and minds. Krewer’s urban fantasies are rooted in personal experience and filtered through the artist’s imagination. Starting from photographs and memory, Krewer strips away the details of character, place and time to reveal the tension, vulnerability and sensuality of life in the city.
Henry Curchod: Set Your Friends Free
2 October - 13 November, 2021
MAMOTH is pleased to present a series of new paintings by Sydney-based artist Henry Curchod on the occasion of his first exhibition in the UK with the gallery.
Henry Curchod’s paintings feature anonymous figures in fantastical scenes, rendered in a uniquely lyrical and multifaceted painting style, a testament to his cultural background and peripatetic life. Examining and constantly exploring processes and materials, each brushstroke and drawn mark is as important as the next. Curchod’s compositions tap into a contemporary desire for unreality and enigma.
Rachel Howard: You Have a New Memory
1 October - 14 November, 2021
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present You Have a New Memory, Rachel Howard’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery in London. The show brings together a new body of work that continues Howard’s pursuit of the possibilities of painting through experimentation.
Throughout the past 25 years, Howard has explored and challenged the capacities of paint, creating works that grapple with notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty, and pain. Revelling in the sheer joy of her chosen material, Howard’s intensely physical approach to painting encourages tensions to play out between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction.
Georg Óskar: PAIN THING
13 October - 13 November, 2021
JD Malat Gallery is pleased to present Pain Thing, a solo exhibition by Icelandic artist Georg Óskar. Pain Thing is a play on words, which refers to both the act of painting and the resulting challenges involved in the process.
On display from 13 October until 13 November 2021, Pain Thing coincides with the much- anticipated return of Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2021, marking a defining moment for the city’s creative community as it emerges from the global pandemic.
Pain Thing presents an introspective body of work comprising 16 new paintings. Infused with a distinct sarcastic twist, Óskar’s artistic practice is a visual diary of his personal observations of the mundane. Óskar’s work is saturated with humour and wit as well as a melancholic quality that channels the artist’s long-standing interest in the extremes of human existence.
Naotaka Hiro: Green Door
9 October - 13 November, 2021
Herald St is pleased to present the first European solo exhibition of the Japan-born, California-based artist Naotaka Hiro. Titled Green Door, the presentation comprises two large-scale canvases, a selection of plywood paintings, and a bronze sculpture, accompanied by a film demonstrating the artist’s intimate and visceral practice.
Hiro’s work is concerned above all with the unknowability of the body and its physical and psychological depths. He marries such influences as the vanguard experiments in movement and matter of the historic Gutai group from his native Osaka with the West Coast performance scene he discovered upon moving to California in 1991. Stemming from his background in filmmaking, Hiro’s process involves a constant back-and-forth between instinctive gestures and careful mark-making, which he likens to the dichotomies of actor/director, subconscious/conscious, filming/editing, or dream/awake, among others. Struggling with the notion that much of one’s body can only be perceived through a mediated form such as a camera or mirror, Hiro places himself as both the artist and subject, working intensely between the two states until their boundaries blur and he reaches ‘a complete void’.
Eliot Greenwald: Vague Distinction
20 October - 13 November, 2021
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Vague Distinction, a solo show by Massachusetts-based artist Eliot Greenwald, opening at the gallery’s Holland Park space on Oct 20 from 6-8 PM.
Eliot Greenwald’s newly commissioned paintings and drawings offer a new approach to his Night Car series. The iconography of the Night Car appears throughout Eliot’s body of work like a personal mythology where a driverless car moves through sci-fi landscapes, picking up passengers under the gaze of two identical planets painted in bold reds, blues and yellows.
Daniel Correa Mejía: Amor y Agua
21 October - 13 November, 2021
Daniel Correa Mejía explores the similitudes between love and water, and in the exhibition Amor y Agua, he conjures the amorous and weaves it through the poetic and symbolic fabric of water.
The presence of water in Mejía’s new body of work is entwined with other recurring elemental forces that are essential to his art: the moon exists, in almost every painting, as the ancient guiding spirit of the night, overseeing the ritual communion between men, sky, earth, and water.
Claudette Johnson: Still Here
8 October - 13 November, 2021
Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Claudette Johnson. This body of work continues Johnson’s engagement with painting the Black subject, involving a considered process of live sittings to create complex paintings of imposing scale and expressive detail. By presenting individual subjects as occupying an undefined context, as Johnson has developed with paintings of women since the early 1980s, Johnson encourages a reading of the Black figure beyond the conventions of portraiture, advocating instead for the sheer presence of the individual.
