Rhythm in the Blues, opening at 14 Percy Street in London from 12 to 20 May, brings together five international artists whose practices share a common preoccupation with rhythm, migration, memory and place, without forcing those concerns into a single argument or a unified aesthetic. The result is an exhibition that breathes.
Co-curated by Pamela Bryan, founder of Octavia Art Gallery in New Orleans, and London-based curator and art advisor Julia Campbell Carter, the show draws its organising metaphor from the cultural legacy of Rhythm and Blues, a form shaped by movement, resilience, and lived experience. The connection between New Orleans and London, two cities whose musical histories are layered with displacement and reinvention, gives the exhibition its geographic axis. Still, the work travels far beyond either city.
Lucille Lewin, Ultimate Intention (2023)
Alia Ali (Top Photo), a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Global Nikon Ambassador, brings a practice rooted in Yemeni heritage and shaped by years of collaboration with Indigenous communities worldwide. Working across photography, textiles, sculpture, and installation, she treats language as embodied rather than merely spoken or written, and her engagement with material traditions as systems of shared knowledge lends her work a density that rewards sustained attention.
Aigana Gali’s luminous abstract canvases draw on the ancient cosmology of Tengrism and the vast mythic landscapes of the Eurasian Steppe. The Georgian-Kazakh painter works with colour and atmospheric form in a way that suggests musical improvisation, gesture responding to gesture, the canvas becoming a kind of score. Her work has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts.
London-based Iranian-American artist Azadeh Ghotbi brings gestural abstraction rooted in personal experience and the particular attentiveness of someone who has lived between cultures. Her canvases ask the viewer to slow down and look past the immediate surface toward what lies beneath.
Naomie Kremer, Israeli-born and American-based, works with jagged geometric forms that create a deliberately disorienting perceptual experience, drawing on art history, music, poetry and architecture in equal measure. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Lucille Lewin, a British South African sculptor and former founder of Whistles and Creative Director of Liberty, works in porcelain through a rigorous process of construction and deconstruction, modelling, cutting, breaking, and reassembling. The results are fractured and poetic, personal and quietly political simultaneously.
Together, these five artists make a case for art as a form of listening.
Top Photo: Alia Ali
Rhythm in the Blues is at 14 Percy Street, London W1T 1DR, from 12 to 20 May 2026.