Our monthly roundup of our favourite London based exhibitions this October, as curated by the BRUSHWRK team…
‘Needle and Thread’ by BRUSHWRK artist @artbyteo_
‘crayola sphinx or dogwoman’, India Nielsen
Soup Gallery
Until 26th October
“Soup presents the gallery’s ninth exhibition, India Nielsen’s solo exhibition ‘crayola sphinx or dogwoman’. Nielsen (b. 1991) lives and works in London. She received her MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art in 2018, having previously completed her BA in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art.
Nielsen’s painting practice invariably incorporates an eclectic pop-culture lexicon informed by exposure to early internet content and customs, the advent of Cartoon Network and MTV UK, and the information overload instigated by social media, smartphones and twenty-four hour news cycles. However, when merged with the artist’s own interest in the philosophical, the astrological and the art historical, as well as an upbringing in the Roman Catholic church, these touchstones of contemporary culture tend towards the allegorical. Rendered in a vibrant, hyperpop palette of generous impasto oil, Nielsen’s cast of characters and the scrawled cursive script that often accompanies them serve as symbolic cyphers or sigils for the artist’s own personal opinions and emotions”
Francis Bacon: Human Presence
National Portrait gallery
10th October - 19th January 2025
“Francis Bacon: Human Presence is the Gallery’s first major exhibition of portraits by this important artist, bringing together rarely-seen works from private collections around the world and photographic portraits of Bacon from the Gallery’s Collection.
Including more than 50 of the artist’s paintings, the exhibition will explore Bacon’s engagement with portraiture from the late 1940s, with a focus on self-portraits and images of key sitters made from the early 1950s onwards; including lovers Peter Lacy, George Dyer and John Edwards; and friends Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud and Muriel Belcher”
Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award
National Portrait Gallery
Until 27th October
“The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award makes a welcome return to the National Portrait Gallery for 2024. The prestigious competition showcases the very best in contemporary portrait painting and is open to everyone aged eighteen and over. Since its inception over 40 years ago, the competition has attracted over 40,000 entries from more than 100 countries and the exhibition has been seen by over 6 million people”
Mike Kelley: ‘Ghost and Spirit’
Tate Modern
2nd October - 9th March 2025
“Discover the elaborate, provocative and imaginary worlds created by experimental artist Mike Kelley.
From the late 1970s to 2012, Kelley made a diverse body of work using drawing, collage, performance, found objects, and video.
Spanning Kelley’s entire career, the exhibition features his breakthrough 'craft' sculptures made from textile and plush toys through to his multi-media installations such as Day Is Done.
Drawing on references from popular and underground culture, literature, and philosophy, Kelley explores how the roles we play in society are entangled with historical fact and imaginary characters from the films and images we consume.
Over a decade since his passing, Kelley’s reflections on identity and memory continue to resonate”
Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation
Whitechappel Gallery
2nd October - 12th January 2025
“Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation’ is a new exhibition from artist and educator Sonia Boyce (b.1962, London, UK).
Opening on 2 Oct 2024, this exhibition is especially conceived to be in dialogue with the exhibition of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, ‘The I and the You’ showing concurrently.
Boyce was introduced to Clark’s work in the 1990s and felt a strong synergy with the Brazilian artist’s experiential and participatory practice. ‘An Awkward Relation’ brings together a number of pivotal and rarely seen works, exploring themes of interaction, participation and improvisation.
By pairing the two artists in this way, audiences are invited to reflect on both the similarities and differences in their works and approaches, while also providing a meeting point for different art histories and cultural contexts to meet”
Jack O’Brien: ‘The Reward’
Camden Art Center
4th October - 29th December
“As the 2023 recipient of Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze, London-based artist Jack O’Brien will develop a major new commission for Camden’s iconic Gallery Three in the autumn of 2024.
O’Brien was awarded the prize for his presentation at Frieze Focus, with his gallery Ginny on Frederick, centred around a large site-specific sculpture—Volent—which repurposed an historical English horse-racing carriage, wrapping it in layers of industrial polythene.
O’Brien describes the objects and materials he incorporates in his work as “eloquent texts” that encode cultural and historical meaning. Manipulating them by twisting, binding, stretching or puncturing feels charged with the erotic and probes at taboo, fetish and the commodification of queer aesthetics. His signature gesture of tightly wrapping objects with industrial polythene submits them to a kind of restraint that accentuates their outer form whilst withholding full legibility, pushing towards abstraction. O’Brien’s practice encompasses painting and drawing as well as sculpture exploring the production of desire and the aesthetic codes of late-capitalist consumption”
Michael Craig-Martin
Royal Academy
Until 10th December
“A key figure in British art, Michael Craig-Martin is one of the most influential artists and teachers of his generation.
Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, prints and digital works, creating a body of work that has fused elements from pop, minimalism and conceptual art.
Craig-Martin will transform our Main Galleries with work from across his career. See his early experimental sculpture and his landmark conceptual work An Oak Tree alongside the large-scale, vivid colour paintings of everyday objects – from corkscrews and umbrellas to laptops and smartphones.
Featuring a dramatic site-specific installation, a group of monumental sculptures and new immersive digital work by the artist, this will be the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Craig-Martin's work ever held in the UK”
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End In Tears
Barbican Centre
Until 5th Jan 2025
"In her first solo exhibition at a major UK institution, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum fills The Curve with theatrical installations, building an imagined world in which to display her paintings.
Enter a world of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s creation in ‘It Will End in Tears’. We move through a series of life-size dioramas, viewing paintings in a narrative sequence, as a story unfurls of a ‘femme fatale’ film noir character living in an imagined colonial outpost. We find out what happens when our main character deviates from the norm and doesn’t follow the rules dictated to her by society.
Featuring drawing, painting and installation, Sunstrum’s artworks reflect her experience of living across Africa, Southeast Asia, and North America. Her boundary-crossing practice is imbued with formative experiences of a life lived at, across, and in the liminal spaces between borders, alongside notions of home and wholeness"
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...
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