Our monthly roundup of our favourite London based exhibitions this April, as curated by the BRUSHWRK team...
BRUSHWRK's latest exhibition party, 'YES!'
Anna Perach: Holes
Gasworks
Until 28th April
“At the heart of Holes lies the concept of the monstrous feminine, echoing throughout history's patriarchal institutions. Perach's work becomes a poignant reflection on how society has historically controlled and dissected the female body, from witch trials to medical treatments of hysteria.
The exhibition spans two rooms, each filled with a variety of installations an sculptures. The sculptures themselves are a testament to Perach's mastery, with their intricate details and unsettling beauty. Limbs stretch, features distort, and faces contort, blurring the boundaries between allure and monstrosity. "Holes" presents a departure from her previous works, blending installation and performance into a visceral experience” - The Shared Drive, @procrastinarting_
Seven Americans
jc gallery
Until 27th April
“Our new exhibition starts this Monday. ‘Seven Americans’, presented by James Ward showcases American modernists who, each in their unique way, have profoundly influenced the trajectory of American art.
The exhibition pays homage to a landmark show, ‘Seven Americans’, held by Stieglitz in 1925 and will exhibit works by artists such as Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth”
Robert Mapplethorpe, as curated by Edward Enninful
Thaddaeus Ropac
Until 6th April
Though not showing in London, we had to include this special exhibition in our April roundup, available to be visited both in Paris and online.
“For this exhibition, Ghanaian-born British editor Edward Enninful OBE has collaborated with the @robertmapplethorpefoundation to present his selection of 46 prints in pairs. Forging new dialogues between some of Mapplethorpe’s best-known photographs, the exhibition invites visitors to experience the balance of confrontation and resonance, of juxtaposition and harmony, that characterises Enninful’s approach to the American artist’s practice.
Enninful first discovered Mapplethorpe’s work in the early 1990s through the artist’s Black Book, a potent photographic study of Black men which was met with controversy but resonated with Enninful. The first quality he was drawn to was the photographer’s use of light. This comes through in his curation, which plays with contrasts of light and dark: facial features defined by gradations of light and shadow, contrasts of skin tones or of clothed and unclothed bodies, arrangements of wildflowers defined by directional lighting and juxtapositions of dark and light backgrounds.
Watch the full interview with @Edward_Enninful and explore the exhibition online via the link in our bio, or visit the exhibition until 6 April 2024”
‘O, o, o, o’: Ross Hammond
Chemist
Until 28th April
“Ross Hammond has moved into Chemist. On the front ground floor large walls lean against the gallery’s own. Uprooted and relocated from elsewhere, they’re treated with wallpaper and paint, ornamented with coving and skirting. Some sections have been cut into, ripped open or taken apart revealing their own fabrication and hidden layers of found and imagined objects and imagery. Situated around these are a series of miniature models of his childhood home, a receding battalion and a barren countryside field.
Behind the gallery space, in the back room of the house, an ageing mediaeval period costume from a Shakespearian BBC production is resting on a hanger while a sound piece of a single speaker is performing.
In ‘Fancy a Cup of Tea’, a previous work by Hammond, he moved his father’s entire south coast living room into an exhibition space in London. This time, it is not the content of the room but in a way, the memory of that house itself. Remodelled based on the family home and other collective working-class domesticity from the 80’s - 90’s, the dislocated walls and miniaturised models are constructs and ruins at the same time.
The exhibition is a tragic-comic quest for a lost identity, home and country; Hammond is building a set dedicated to the heroic and futile, to the anti hero who’s in constant repositioning in time, moving between a desire to forget and the obsession to remember. O, o, o, o as Brian Dillon writes ‘is surely nothing more or less than the vocal expression, precisely, of silence. O' is the tragic apotheosis of zero.’”
Portraits to Dream In: Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron
National Portrait Gallery
Until 16th June
“Photographers Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron are two of the most influential women in the history of photography. They lived a century apart – Cameron working in the UK and Sri Lanka from the 1860s, and Woodman in America and Italy from the 1970s. Both women explored portraiture beyond its ability to record appearance – using their own creativity and imagination to suggest notions of beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling. Showcasing more than 160 rare vintage prints, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In spans the career of both artists – and suggests new ways to look at their work, and the way photographic portraiture was created in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest
South London Gallery
Until 9th June
"Photography has long been associated with acts of resistance. It is used to document action, share ideas, inspire change, tell stories, gather evidence and fight against injustice.
This group exhibition at the SLG, organised in collaboration with the V&A, spans the Main Gallery and the Fire Station, and brings together works by international artists and collectives who are using the camera to challenge and move beyond traditional protest photography.
This urgent and political exhibition explores feminism and activism from an international and contemporary perspective. Looking at different approaches to feminism from the past 10 years, the show highlights shared concerns including intersectionality, transnational solidarity, and the use of social media and digital technology as a tool for change.
Acts of Resistance will reflect on recent events from across the globe, such as anti-rape protests in Bangladesh responding to the rise in violence against women and girls in 2020; the US Supreme Court overturning of Roe vs Wade in 2022; as well as the ongoing protests against the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Artists include: Laia Abril, Hoda Afshar, Poulomi Basu, Nan Goldin, Guerrilla Girls, Sofia Karim, Mari Katayama, Teresa Margolles, Sethembile Msezane, Zanele Muholi, Wendy Red Star, Tabita Rezaire, Raphaela Rosella, Aida Silvestri, Sheida Soleimani, Hannah Starkey, Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, and Carmen Winant."
Nick Waplington: Living Room
Hamiltons Gallery
Until 25th May
“Hamiltons Gallery is thrilled to debut their first exhibition with Nick Waplington, which marks the new release of previously unseen image variants and new works from his iconic series Living Room, 1991.
Nick Waplington’s first book, Living Room, was published in 1991, and was an instant sensation within the photography world and beyond. The 59 photographs in the original edition documented the lives of friends, families, and neighbours on the Broxtowe housing estate in Nottingham, England, where Waplington spent many years making thousands of images.
This extensive archive of unseen photographs forms the basis of this new conceptual remake of the 1991 monograph, one that revisits and refashions Waplington’s iconic work from a contemporary vantage point.
This is the first show of Waplington’s ‘Living Room’ in over 30 years, and the artist’s first UK show since his exhibition at Tate Britain 10 years ago, and will be accompanied by the new 2024 reprint of Living Room, which will be available to buy from Hamiltons Gallery”
‘Some May Work As Symbols’
Raven Row
Until 5th May
"A rich diversity of artistic approaches existed in Brazil in the decades around the mid-twentieth century, after the first modernist wave had settled. This exhibition finds conversations between various forms of abstraction, symbolism and figuration that were circulating and interacting in the visual culture of that time. The abstract geometries produced by the concretists and neo-concretists in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – Judith Lauand, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape amongst them – are now internationally celebrated. The Afro-Brazilian symbology developed in the same period by artists such as Mestre Didi, Abdias Nascimento and Rubem Valentim, often referring to Candomblé and other spiritual practices, was no less pioneering. Also brought into dialogue are depictions of street scenes, domestic life and agricultural labour – perennially popular genres in Brazilian art, which are elaborated in the compositions of Silvia de Leon Chalreo, the theatrical stagings of Heitor dos Prazeres, and the expressive textiles of Madalena Santos Reinbolt"
Zineb Sidera: ‘Dreams Have No Titles’
Whitechapel Gallery
Until 12th May
"Whitechapel Gallery presents the UK debut of Zineb Sedira’s critically acclaimed exhibition Dreams Have No Titles.
Originally conceived for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Dreams Have No Titles is an immersive installation comprising film, sculpture, photography and performance, that interweaves the artist’s biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal moment in the history of avant-garde film production.
Sedira transforms the Gallery’s exhibition space into a series of film sets. In one gallery, visitors find themselves in a ballroom from Ettore Scola’s iconic film Le Bal (1983), and in another, a recreation of the living room from Sedira’s Brixton home. A full-scale cinema will also be constructed in the upper galleries, to screen Sedira’s film of the same name, Dreams Have No Titles, in which the audience will see many of the sets that they’ve encountered in the exhibition as a backdrop for Sedira’s own shoot.
Dreams Have No Titles blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, using cinema and performance to foreground the importance – and joy – of collective shared experiences, while simultaneously raising a warning about the failure of the emancipatory dream that for many people remains an unfulfilled promise"
When Forms Come Alive
Hayward Gallery
Until 6th May
"PRESENTING… When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture (7 February — 6 May 2024) The exhibition unleashes an expansive wave of energetic sculptural forms that seem to ooze, undulate, blossom, erupt and sprawl in the gallery space, inspiring fluid and shifting realms of experience that will surprise viewers at every turn.
Embodying a playful rebuke to rigid geometries, the works within When Forms Come Alive will evoke the pleasures of spontaneous gesture and movement, the poetics of gravity, and the experience of sensation itself"
BURTYNSKY: EXTRACTION / ABSTRACTION
Saatchi Gallery
Until 6th May
"The largest exhibition of works by world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky. Featuring large-scale photographs, murals, film installation and augmented reality"
If you enjoyed this article, make sure to check out our other blog posts including Artist Spotlight interviews and more over on https://www.brushwrk.co.uk/blog and whilst you’re there, why not have a look through all of the fantastic art we have for sale from emerging artists? Pop into the website to see what catches your eye…