Exhibitions Closing This Week
Mixing It Up: Painting Today
9 September - 12 December, 2021
Mixing It Up brings together 31 contemporary painters who exploit the unique characteristics of their medium to create fresh, compelling works of art that speak to this moment.
Approaching painting as a platform for speculative thinking and unexpected conversations, the artists in this exhibition make works that oscillate between observation and invention, depiction and allegory, illusion and materiality.
Giosetta Fioroni: Alter Ego
12 October - 11 December, 2021
Giosetta Fioroni (b.1932, Rome) is considered one of the most important figures in Italian painting of the postwar era. Her work is commonly associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group in Rome, which also included Mario Schifano, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli, among others, as well as with the advent of Pop art in Italy. Yet Fioroni’s practice differs from those of her immediate contemporaries and from the overarching notion of Pop as it came to be understood in the English-speaking world. The divergences are most clearly pronounced in her persistent exploration of femininity, rooted in both her personal experiences and her interpretation of the category in popular culture. ‘I have worked a lot, not on feminism but on femininity’, she once explained. ‘I would like to maintain a distinction. In a period of lively feminism, I was interested in the look, in the atmosphere tied to femininity.’
Yulia Iosilzon & Anna Skladmann: Paradise Is Not Just a Place
17 September - 10 December, 2021
Roman Road is thrilled to present Paradise Is Not Just a Place, a duo show of new works by Yulia Iosilzon and Anna Skladmann. This is the first exhibition at Roman Road since February 2020.
Skladmann’s photographs and Iosilzon’s paintings draw on forbidden fruit as a repeated motif, exploring tropes of temptation, abundance, and nourishment. The works are interwoven with a meadow of ceramic flowers, bringing the life cycle of the plant into the gallery space, and picking up shared references to species that feature across the two artists’ imagery. The exhibition inhabits a notion of overgrowth, of plants taking over the ruins of the past, seeding themselves in the cracks of history. Stories leave microscopic traces through the life cycles of plants and people; we all become food for plants in the end.
Tarek Sebastian Al-Shammaa: Prince of Peace / The Gulf Between Us
25 November 2021 - 12 December, 2021
The Bomb Factory South is pleased to announce ‘Prince of Peace // The Gulf Between Us’, an exhibition of new paintings by Tarek Sebastian Al-Shammaa.
Tarek Sebastian Al-Shammaa is a painter who creates large technicolour canvasses that delve into tropes of mysticism, colonialism, and tokenism. As a first-generation French / Iraqi living in Britain, he continually questions the ongoing turmoil and injustices in the Middle East under Western imperialism, and the effects of colonial exoticism.
His main practice is contemporary history painting in which he combines historical and mythological subject matter, but contrasts these ideas with the harsh reality of the contemporary world. As an artist with a complicated mixed ancestry he is ideally placed to comment on the past / current dominant forces at large.
Knocking It Out of The Park: Presented by Paint Talk
25 November - 12 December, 2022
Paint Talk and GALLERY46 are delighted to present ‘Knocking It Out Of The Park’, a group show of work by Joshua Armitage, Klaas Op De Beйck, Yage Guo, Christabel MacGreevy, Alexi Marshall, Sarah Pickstone, Sofya Shpurova and Pawel Sliwinski.
‘Knocking it out of the park’ is the sequel to Paint Talk’s inaugural group show at GALLERY46 in April, 2021.
Following The First Swing of the Bat, we have a clean hit which preferably clears the stands. A large crack permeates the night air, reverberates, echoing against collective joint inhalation. There is no time to dwell on the heat nor moisture loitering at every turn. We are unquestionably in the thick of it, the noise is deafening, time moves slower and faster simultaneously. Knocking it out of the park alludes to the constant onslaught of departures and arrivals in the studio throughout the process of creation.
NIGHT | Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy with Urs Fischer
12 October - 10 December, 2021
Nahmad Projects is pleased to present NIGHT | Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy with Urs Fischer. Generating a discourse between the contemporary artist’s universe and the legacy of two Surrealist masters, the exhibition includes paintings by Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) alongside the debut of a new wallpaper installation by Urs Fischer (b. 1973).
NIGHT is the second chapter of a two-part project, with the first half titled SUPERUNKNOWN which took place at Nahmad Contemporary, New York, in September – November 2020. This first exhibition presented Ernst and Tanguy alongside an urban environment filled with foreboding for the future, a reflection on our changing society and its dialogue with the historical context of Ernst and Tanguy’s 1920s and 1930s works.
This new environment turns its focus inwards, exploring the metamorphosis of consciousness.
Disgrace: Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings
16 September - 11 December, 2021
Arcadia Missa is proud to present Disgrace, a solo exhibition by Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. Containing a new body of works that includes a film, a fresco, two coloured pencil drawings and a series of twelve etchings, Disgrace explores the history of feminism on the political right in the UK, from the Edwardian period to today.
Richard Estes: Voyages
10 September - 12 December, 2021
Newport Street Gallery presents ‘Richard Estes: Voyages’, the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK, 10 September – 12 December 2021. The show, curated by Andrew Heyward, will include over forty-five paintings made over the last thirty years. While Estes is best known for his paintings of New York, the London show will also feature paintings made following trips to Europe, Asia, Africa and Antarctica.
