Art
Bella Bonner-Evans
Klodin Erb, Mermaids #23, 2023. Photo by Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy of the artist and Bernheim.
There’s South London, where experimentation reigns; Bloomsbury, where newly opened galleries are around every corner; and the East End, where Cambridge Heath Road is studded with art spots. It’s that time of year again: London Gallery Weekend is once again set to take place across the British capital, from May 31st to June 2nd. The world’s largest event of its kind, the gallery-led initiative is a testament to London’s tight-knit and ever-expanding art scene, featuring over 130 participating galleries—including 16 new additions—for its fourth edition.
Each of the three days will see special events taking place at galleries throughout the city, including drinks receptions, guided tours, talks, family workshops, and more, along with artist-led public performances by Adelaide Cioni and Nil Yalter, the latter of whom is the recipient of the 60th Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement.
Here are Artsy’s picks of 10 must-see shows during London Gallery Weekend 2024.
Hauser & Wirth
Through July 17
Working across painting, photography, and filmmaking, Harmony Korine is best known as the writer of cult film Kids (1995) and the director of dark and drug-fueled movies including Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012), yet he has carved out a niche as a fine artist alongside his silver-screen career. His art work has been exhibited at institutions worldwide, including Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2017, the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in 2009, the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and New York’s Whitney Biennial in 2000, among others.
“AGGRESSIVE DR1FTER Part II” is the second installment of an exhibition Korine mounted in 2023 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. Featuring painted stills from his 2023 film Aggo Dr1ft, which follows the life of a seasoned hitman relentlessly pursuing his next target, the works on show are intense and chaotic, with unsettlingly violent and hyper-masculine undertones.
David Zwirner
June 6–July 26
Michaël Borremans, The Talent, 2023. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
Michaël Borremans, The Monkey, 2023. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
Ghent-based Michaël Borremans’s practice spans film, photography, and sculpture, but he is best known for his seductive, surreal, and sinister oil paintings. Borremans’s eighth solo exhibition with David Zwirner, and first with the gallery in London since 2015, will be open for a sneak preview throughout London Gallery Weekend, ahead of its official unveiling on June 6th.
“The Monkey” features a suite of new, elegant, and enigmatic paintings depicting porcelain monkeys and uncanny scenes, such as The Gardener (2023), in which a giant monkey tends to the trees of a model garden. For Borremans, the animal is a stand-in for the artist in the contemporary art world, as he said in an interview earlier this year: “Especially today, the artist is more and more like a monkey that has to perform for the public,” he said.
Portrait of Nan Goldin in her Brooklyn, New York apartment, 2023. Photo by Jason Schmidt. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Having joined Gagosian’s stable and topped the Power100 last year, Nan Goldin has recently been receiving much-deserved global recognition for both her photography and activism. For London Gallery Weekend, Gagosian will present a site-specific installation of Goldin’s revelatory, agonizing, and unmissable film, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–22), at the former Welsh chapel, a deconsecrated church in Soho. The film explores the life of Goldin’s older sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, who was sent to a psychiatric detention center at age 12 and spent time in and out of such facilities for the next six years, dying by suicide at 18.
The heartbreaking and deeply personal film draws on the myth of early Christian martyr Saint Barbara—a woman who was tortured for defying her parents’ beliefs—as an allegory for Goldin’s sister’s fate. It goes on to survey Goldin’s teenage years spent desperately seeking her tribe in the wake of her sister’s suicide, unpicking themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality.
Stephen Friedman Gallery
May 31–July 20
Kenturah Davis, volume II (marjani), 2024. © Kenturah Davis. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York; and Matthew Brown, Los Angeles and New York.
Kenturah Davis graduated with an MFA from the Yale University School of Art just six years ago, but her work is already held in numerous institutional collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Utilizing text as a point of departure, Davis’s debut solo exhibition in the U.K., “clouds,” features three distinct series, all based on an expansive essay penned by the artist that references dance, musical composition, theoretical physics, and the African diaspora.
With words faintly debossed into the igarashi kozo paper surfaces of hand-drawn portraits of Black women in motion, such as planar vessel XXIX (marcella) (2024), Davis revisits histories of Black excellence across fields such as choreography and music composition. Meanwhile, in the 12 powdered indigo pigment drawings depicting clouds and created from snapshots the artist took of the sky, the debossed text draws on the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli. Cerebral, complex, and immensely detailed, all three series highlight the artist’s exceptional draftsmanship and capacity to capture movement and energy.
Victoria Miro
June 1–July 27
Boscoe Holder, Fret Work, 1988. © Boscoe Holder. Courtesy of the Boscoe Holder Estate and Victoria Miro.
Victoria Miro’s exhibition for London Gallery Weekend revisits the oeuvres of two brothers, Boscoe Holder (who died in 2007) and Geoffrey Holder (who died in 2014), presented together for the first time. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, the brothers each had groundbreaking, polymathic careers, with this exhibition foregrounding their painting careers against the significance of their achievements in the dance and acting world.
Boscoe settled in the U.K. in 1950, teaching at prestigious dance schools and choreographing and costuming shows at world-renowned venues before returning to Trinidad in 1970 to focus on painting until his death. Meanwhile, Geoffrey immigrated to the U.S. in 1953, where he performed as principal dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York, before embarking on a career in film.
Though overlooked, both brothers’ painting practice was fundamental to their creative drive, continuously informing their work in other fields. Geoffrey’s works from the late 1970s into the early 2000s depict scenes of lively dancers reveling in a nightclub, for example, while Boscoe’s works made in Trinidad in the 1990s focus on the male nude—a significant strand of his work that was rarely exhibited during his lifetime.
The Sunday Painter & Matt’s Gallery
Through July 7
Harminder Judge, installation view of “A Ghost Dance ” at Matt’s Gallery & The Sunday Painter. Photo by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of the artist, Matt’s Gallery, and The Sunday Painter.
A member of The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024, London-based artist Harminder Judge has a unique approach to materials. His intensive, self-devised process involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster, which he then sands, oils, and polishes, resulting in shimmering and seductive surfaces which appear like portals hovering off the wall, eternally suspended in space.
“A Ghost Dance,” held across these two South London galleries, considers the presence of ghosts and spirits, drawing on Western modernism, Indian neo-tantric painting, American transcendental painting, and familial funeral traditions drawn from the artist’s native rural Punjab. The title itself refers to an Indigenous North American ceremony: a circle dance intended to raise the spirits of the dead so that they may fight alongside the living to reclaim land from colonial settlers.
MASSIMODECARLO
Through July 22
Hannah Levy, installation view of “Bulge” at MASSIMODECARLO, 2024. Photo by Robert Glowacki. Courtesy the Artist and MASSIMODECARLO.
New York–based artist Hannah Levy’s debut solo exhibition in London, “Bulge” at MASSIMODECARLO, pulsates with an unsettling, apocalyptic ambience. The viewer feels as if they have entered an otherworldly realm where tripod-legged, bulbous humanoids and arachnid creatures reign supreme.
Housed in a 1723 Grade II Listed building, complete with original cornicing, historically preserved green-painted walls, and a matching green carpet, the poisonous creatures within both lean into and push against the decorative comfort of their surroundings. This playfulness is typical of Levy’s practice, as an artist obsessed with “design purgatory”—the space of bulging potential between function and futility. MASSIMODECARLO recently announced its representation of Levy, who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2018, as well as the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Hales Gallery
May 30–July 13
Carole Gibbons, Green Moroccan Vase, ca. 1982. © Carole Gibbons. Photo by Damian Griffiths. Courtesy of the artist and Hales, London and New York.
Carole Gibbons received early career success between the 1960s and 1980s, becoming the first living woman to have a solo exhibition at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in 1975. However, she quickly drifted into obscurity and has only recently gained more widespread recognition. Now in her late eighties, the artist is featured in “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990” at Tate Britain, and she had a recent solo exhibition at White Columns in New York.
For its first presentation with the Scottish artist, Hales Gallery spotlights the still-life paintings she made from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Evocative and atmospheric, these pieces draw upon the Greek myths that obsessed the artist as a child. The many cherished objects she has collected throughout her lifetime—a Moroccan vase, a Chinese horse figurine, a scallop shell, and a stone head rescued after it fell from a local church—are recurring motifs.
Klodin Erb, Mermaids #23, 2023. Photo by Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy of the artist and Bernheim.
Following Swiss gallery Bernheim’s expansion to London in the fall of last year, it seems fitting that, for London Gallery Weekend, it is unveiling a solo exhibition of works by renowned Swiss painter Klodin Erb. Building on the success of her recent exhibition at Rome’s Istituto Svizzero, the show explores transformation and alternative, genderless embodiment through portraying fantastical mermaids and witchy, symbolic ingredients.
For example, Kräfte und Säfte #15 (2021) depicts the mandrake, a root with hallucinogenic and narcotic properties. Meanwhile, Erb’s abstract landscapes, like Innere Insel (Inner Island) (2021), are suggestive of a fantasy realm where nature is dominant, in all its colorful glory, drawing attention to the ongoing climate emergency while imagining what an alternative future might look like.
Cooke Latham Gallery
Through June 2
Fani Parali, installation view of “Children of the Future” at Cooke Latham Gallery, 2024. Photo by Mischa Haller. Courtesy of the artist and Cooke Latham Gallery.
Spanning performance, sculpture, painting, and audio, Fani Parali’s ambitious exhibition “Children of the Future” confronts the potential ramifications of unbridled technological progress on the next generation. Set against the backdrop of the increasing use of automation and AI, her poignant installation invites critical analysis of the status quo while exploring the myriad possible futures that technology presents, and the potential redemption it could hold for our species.
Parali designed this exhibition to be viewed by children: Paintings depicting public water fountains are hung at the height of a five-year-old, while the audio soundtrack for her “lip-synched opera” performance utilizes the voice of a child in a call-and-response song with a machine. In so doing, the artist creates an unexpected and bizarre realm that destabilizes adult knowledge systems, thereby offering a chance of seeing the world anew.
