From Katrin Hornek’s post-apocalyptic wasteground to Kristof Santy’s majestic magnifications of the mundane, here are our latest cohort’s top spring exhibitions
The fair returns to The Shed in New York this year with a new curator for Focus,more than 60 galleries from 25 countries and a extensive program of events and activations
This month, Frieze's Mayfair gallery hosts three shows, including a dual exhibition by Tamara K.E. and Gia Edzgveradze and the first solo presentation of photographer Adam Rouhana
The Sunderland Collection, a private collection of rare antique world and celestial maps, is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of its newly launched Art Programme: Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands.
Born in Cairo in 1957 to Egyptian and Nubian parents, Fathi Hassan gained prominence in the 1980s. In 1988, he became one of the first artists of African heritage to be included in the Venice Art Biennale. Having moved from Egypt in his early twenties to study at the Naples Art School, Hassan spent decades living and working in Italy. Now based in Edinburgh, he works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation. Hassan graduated from the Naples Art School in 1984 and became an active participant in an avant-garde art scene which attracted international figures including Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Hermann Nitsch. It was a time of political upheaval and artistic experimentation, with a thriving dance music scene, in which Hassan’s practice developed and was influenced by his work as a screen and stage actor and set designer.
During his immersion in The Sunderland Collection, Hassan contemplated the global confluence of ideas and peoples, the tides of cultural encounters, and his own personal history. Moving back and forth in time, the body of work that he has produced comprises a visually arresting, richly coloured tapestry of memories, concepts, historical figures, and Hassan’s distinctive artistic expression.
Hassan pictures an imagined realm where musicians, writers, entertainers and scientists converge, whose lives and work have not only inspired him, but have had a profound, transnational influence on global thought and culture. This series, entitled Trail Blazers, features revolutionaries and Modernists Virginia Woolf and Charlie Chaplin, alongside activists who changed the course of history, such as Muhammad Ali. Among the ancient cultural figures who inspired Hassan are Muhammad al-Idrisi and Averroes. Timelines and borders collapse and intertwine, with the selected cast of characters forming a bridge between geographies, eras and identities. The series uses objects from The Sunderland Collection as a backdrop or mirror for these historic cultural figures, whom Hassan envisions coming together in an imagined space.
While exploring The Sunderland Collection, Hassan also drew heavily on his personal history and the journeys on which his life has taken him. The exhibition will present mixed-media works combining collage, print, pencil, and gouache that depict autobiographical components of Hassan’s lived and artistic journeys, Italian landscapes, and motifs that the artist has consistently incorporated into his practice, such as animals from his childhood, a crescent moon and Nubian warriors. The pieces reflect on the flooding of Nubia in 1952 which displaced the artist’s family five years before his birth, with symbols including the traditional boats (felucca) which were used to navigate the Nile, and which have come to represent the displacement of people by the flood.
Alongside the new works being presented, the artist has selected a range of works on paper and two photographs from different stages of his career, which speak to his personal journey and identity, and which add to the conversation that he begins with the map-based works.
John Swarbrooke Fine Art is pleased to present Macabre, an exhibition inspired by Sussex artist Edward Burra’s lifetime fascination with the macabre. The otherworldliness of Burra’s pictures provides the starting point for this exhibition, which features a century of artworks exploring the theme of the macabre. The exhibition includes paintings, works on paper and sculpture by Edward Burra, John Minton, Graham Sutherland, Elizabeth Frink, Michael Ayrton, Grayson Perry and Damien Hirst amongst others.
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent works by post-modernist painter and sculptor Rameshwar Broota. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London.
Currently working in his revelatory period of abstraction, laborious means of layering paint and scraping the surface with a blade to create unique variations Rameshwar Broota is drawn to exploring an inner journey of the human condition motivated by deep self-awareness. His quintessentially in tone often leads to patterns and images emerging serendipitously in his compositions, which sometimes appear as a chaotic conclusion or genesis of time, technology, nature and mankind itself.
Alongside Broota’s recent paintings, the exhibition also features a suite of multi-dimensional resin sculptures, bearing calligraphic texts, found objects and varying materials. The glass-like opacity of the work prompts a magnified examination of the marks and layers held inside, becoming a kind of relic that invites repeated and concentrated viewing. The practice and conscientiousness of the artist are steeped in an exploration of the fractures and friction of change and development that remain political in the real world, philosophical in the celestial phase and characteristically concurrent.
This spring, Frieze No.9 Cork Street sees a full-gallery takeover by Matt Carey-Williams, whose curatorial project ‘Bump’ features 21 painters from around the world
In a two-week exhibition at the gallery, the creator of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse responds to Paul Simon’s latest album Seven Psalms with seven new sketches
Counterpoints Arts, Dover Arts Development, Shubbak Festival and Frieze No.9 Cork Street are pleased to present I’d search forever, I want to remember, a multidisciplinary body of work by artist Tamara Al-Mashouk that asks if matter and place remember the way our bodies do.
The exhibition features a wave machine that contains water from the English Channel brought in as witness, a three-channel film that explores the psyche of a disused detention centre in Dover and a photographic series that engages with the shoreline as a site of poetic multiplicity.
The work presented is the result of a gathering of artists thinking and organising together. Manon Schwich, Sami El-Enany, Parker Heyl, Angus Frost, Lorella Bianco, Fadi Giha and Patricia Doors join Al-Mashouk in considering sites of solace within embodied experiences of hyper-politicisation.
In late June and July 2023, discover solo shows by renowned artists Rasheed Araeen and Jimmie Durham and a dual-artist exhibition by London-based Ella McVeigh and Konstantina Krikzoni
Explore shows by international artists including Dongwook Suh, Ahnnlee Lee, Yoonhee Choi, Khari Turner, Arpita Singh and Gee’s Bend quilting collective, among others
This month's displays from international galleries will feature solo shows by Korean filmmaker IM Heung-soon and multidisciplinary artist Ali Kazim, and a dual-artist exhibition by Tom Howse and Jone Kvie
This month's pop-up shows from international galleries include an exhibition of Iranian artists titled 'Realism', works by Belgian artist Alice Frey and a group exhibition organised by Faridah Folawiyo centering works by Black female artists
Frieze's Mayfair gallery space will feature artists including Woo Hannah, Tom Howse, Y.Z. Kami, Ali Kazim, Abigail Lucien, Isabel Okoro, Emma Prempeh, Im Heung-soon, plus a trans* and non-binary reading night 'TISSUE' hosted by Sam Moore and Donna Marcus Duke
For the spring programme, Tiwani Contemporary will showcase a dual exhibition featuring works by Emma Prempeh and Abigail Lucien alongside a presentation by G Gallery of Woo Hannah's fabric installations
The artist and Sonic Youth musician chat about their longstanding friendship, favourite word in the English language and dream dinner party in the second instalment of the video series from Frieze No.9 Cork Street
Barakat Contemporary (Seoul) presents solo exhibitions of three pioneering Korean artists Yunchul Kim, Chung Seoyoung and Sojung Jun, from 1-17 December 2022.
