Overview

  • Route

    My curated route focusses on galleries participating in Portrait Mode, an unprecedented collaboration with more than 100 organisations across London, the UK and the world foregrounding portraiture and celebrating the National Portrait Gallery’s reopening on 22 June 2023.
  • My curated route focusses on galleries participating in 'Portrait Mode', an unprecedented collaboration with more than 100 organisations across London, the UK and the world foregrounding portraiture and celebrating the National Portrait Gallery’s reopening on 22 June 2023.

    So, don’t miss Frank Auerbach’s extraordinary exhibition of self-portraits at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert (the first such exhibition ever devoted to his self-portraits), 'Balthus: Under the Surface' at Luxembourg +Co., which provides a rare chance, as the first exhibition in this country since his Tate retrospective in 1968, to see some extraordinary works (and I’m very much looking forward to being in conversation with Cécile Debray, President of the Musée national Picasso, Paris on Monday 5 June at 5pm to discuss Balthus).

     

    Richard Saltoun has a solo exhibition for Florence Peake, whose paintings, sculptures, films, and performances challenge the classical Western painterly canon. Timothy Taylor has an exhibition for Sahara Longe, her first solo exhibition in the UK, which will present crowd scenes based on Brixton, where she lives.


    Finally in the West End, I’m looking forward to 'It Just Happened' at Thaddaeus Ropac - an exhibition of photographs by the American photographer and writer Bob Colacello, documenting his long-standing collaboration with Andy Warhol and social whirl and work, curated by Elena Foster and the Ivorypress team.

     

    After that, I’m going to head East to see the fascinating exhibition for the self-taught artist Reverend Joyce McDonald at Maureen Paley: Studio M at Rochelle School (and maybe a spot of lunch there at Rochelle Canteen), her first solo exhibition there of her wonderful clay sculptures, many of which address the AIDS epidemic and social justice. After that, I will be sure to call into Victoria Miro to see the great double-whammy of exhibitons there, including the last weekend for Isaac Julien’s exhibition 'Once Again… (Statues Never Die)', which explores the relationship between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who was an early US collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’ and Chris Ofili’s just opened exhibition of new paintings focussing on the seven deadly sins.