London’s sprawling art scene has long been a web of contradictions. Cork Street’s abandoned storefronts, still bearing the signs of recently departed galleries like Tiwani and Stephen Friedman, prompted grim comparisons to a graveyard during the recent London Gallery Weekend. Pace‘s sudden downsize did little to lift the mood. Yet, just streets away, the champagne was flowing. One new arrival to the capital, Sundaram Tagore, certainly has something to celebrate, as do midsize movers like Edel Assanti and Emalin, which are multiplying with additional spaces.
The weekend reminded me that an art market and an art scene are not quite the same thing. All told, 126 galleries took part from June 5–7, and the city felt anything but subdued. Many shows revealed a renewed interest in spirituality while others reckoned with nostalgia. Moreover, it’s clear that South Asian art is becoming ever more central to London’s cultural identity. Here are the standouts.
Tapping Into the Transcendental
Heading into Lévy Gorvy Dayan during a hop around Mayfair on Thursday morning, I stumbled into a crowd of stylized figures and faces. A Cycladic marble idol, a wooden Egyptian mask, and a Vietnamese Buddha, courtesy of antiquities dealers Rupert Wace and Charles Ede, mingled effortlessly among Louise Bourgeois‘s Femme bronzes, a Matisse sketch, and Meret Oppenheim‘s fetishistic, mini terracotta pieces.
The architect of this unlikely meeting was British artist Thomas Houseago, who burst, unbidden, into a moving speech about the role of art in connecting us to the past and ourselves. All the works served to remind us that “we’ve always lived in a body.” What could tech possibly offer that beats the “awkwardness of the human hand?” Houseago asked. “There’s a line running through art that collapses time, collapses context.”
At the center of the installation is a rare Aztec mirror. On entry, visitors’ faces flash over the polished disc of volcanic glass, a sacred object that was once used as a conduit into the spiritual dimension. Houseago’s must-see show runs through September 19.
His words rang in my ears as I proceeded to Oliver Beer at Thaddaeus Ropac (until July 31). The British artist has produced paintings using sound vibrations, part of a project carried out with the musician Rufus Wainwright in France’s prehistoric caves that attempts to understand their use and significance for caveman dwellers. What stood out was Beer’s awe at hovering his own hand over the handprint left by another artist so many millennia ago. The feeling is “hard to describe,” he said. “Nobody really understands.”
An arty crowd with an impressive array of hair colors descended, en masse, on Sprüth Magers for a first glimpse of Anne Imhof‘s Berlin-coded, greyscale sculptures, on view through August 1. Slip past the confronting crowd-control barriers, and you’re met with surprisingly tender relief figurations that refer back to Renaissance funerary sculpture and a medieval fixation with the danse macabre. They are set against the drama of vast, crashing wave paintings.
Over at Fitzrovia Chapel on Friday evening, meanwhile, Gallery Rosenfeld staged an ancient nuptiae mysticae, or “spiritual marriage,” between Serbian performance artist Marta Jovanović and curator Cristiano Leone, which saw the pair read each other 99 handwritten vows over three hours before receiving matching tattoos.
The Limits of Nostalgia
Several London artists turned their gaze instead to the recent past with humor rather than heavy hands.
Take the vast ship constructed by British artist Dominic Watson at the Sunday Painter in Vauxhall (until July 11). This fantastical, vintage-style galleon, constructed from scraps of disassembled, deserted playhouses and completed with monstrous, waxy figures, is a biting metaphor for modern Britain.
The technology that once allowed dominance lies obsolete, its creaking fragility and decay poorly masked by a nostalgia that Watson sees as “juvenile and fantastical, like a fairytale.” He added that, with fairytales, there’s often a darker reality that we sugarcoat for kids, which is fitting since “the world feels like it’s being run by petulant children,” who trade insults in lieu of old diplomacy.
The power of nostalgia is also at work in London artist Alvaro Barrington‘s tribute to nineties New York at Emalin in Clerkenwell, running through August 15. Colorfully evocative installations pair beauty and fashion items with boomboxes playing hip-hop—beloved creative outlets for community and escapism during the era’s devastating crack cocaine epidemic, which is alluded to throughout by piled sacks of white powder.
Masculinity, ever up for scrutiny, is the subject of London-based American artist Gray Wielebinski‘s new work at Nicoletti in Shoreditch (until July 4). His charmingly DIY, nearly Neo-Dada assemblages were made by sticking found objects like books, gloves, and splayed fans onto towering piles of tatty old boxes. These were, in turn, pasted over with newspaper clippings, but confusion abounds as buff jocks are stamped over alternately with labels reading “loser, “lover,” or “son.” Old categories collapse and, throughout, conventional constructions of manhood slip into homoerotica.
Pin-ups also appear in the work of British post-pop artist Andrew Heard, whose long-forgotten paintings are being revived at Amanda Wilkinson in Farringdon (until August 8). In the early 1980s, we see him have fun queering the misty-eyed motifs of the fifties and sixties. Tragically, following the death of Heard’s friend to AIDS-related illness, and in light of his own diagnosis, the artist’s work takes a turn, grappling instead with the reality of inhabiting a societally stigmatized identity.
South Asia in the Spotlight
There has been a surge of strong institutional outings for South Asian art across the British capital in recent years, including, currently, an unmissable T. Venkanna show at Studio Voltaire (until August 9). Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, the Goan nonprofit Serendipity Arts held a two-day celebration of South Asian culture across South Kensington.
Meanwhile, Kiran Nadar Museum‘s takeover of Christie’s, timed to the return of its dedicated auction of South Asian art on June 11, is evidence enough that institutional backing has reliably led to a rush of commercial interest.
“The city has a long history of engagement with South Asian culture,” said Sundaram Tagore, whose group show featured Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Begum Lipi, Indian yogi Sohan Qadri, and California-based Trishla Jain (until June 20). He added that London is “a major hub for affluent Indians and members of the global South Asian diaspora, many of whom are increasingly active in the international art market.”
Renowned collectors Kiran Nadar, Rajeeb Samdani, and Udit Bhambri were the stars of a well-attended opening at No. 9 Cork Street on Wednesday, where they caught New Delhi staple Vadehra Art Gallery‘s presentation of paintings by the late great A. Ramachandran. The selection includes eccentric examples from his 1980s “Puppet Theatre” series and more decoratively mannered work like Girl on a Swing (2017). Mumbai’s Project 88, meanwhile, took over the first floor with a group show that platformed more emerging names. Both tenancies last until July 4.
Over at Victoria Miro‘s Wharf Road outpost, Indian artist N.S. Harsha and Pakistani-American Shahzia Sikander are both showing new work (until July 31). Sikander has used hand-painted imagery to animate Britain’s cultivation and trade of opium in India and China. At Sim Smith in Camberwell, Indian-American felt artist Melissa Joseph is presenting large and tiny pieces inspired by a recent trip to Scotland, until July 18.
