Prem Sahib

My route starts in Central London and ends in the East End.

Start your day at Phillida Reid on Grape Street. I love visiting the gallery because it’s so central and located on a beautiful street that feels calm and conducive to experiencing art – the perfect start to a busy London route.

The gallery hosts a new group show, A garment, a pin, a seam, a shield, which focuses on the ways in which the body – and its coverings – become sites of tension, care, rupture, and remediation. Featuring collage, textile, photography, sculpture, and film, the exhibition includes the work of five artists: Myriam Mihindou, Liz Magor, Joanna Piotrowska, Vivian Lynn, and Gray Wielebinski. I’m particularly excited to encounter Liz Magor's work again, since we both exhibited side-by-side at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2017. I find her sculptures so haunting. I’m also looking forward to seeing Gray Wielebinski’s new works featuring tiles – a form that I am always drawn to.

Since you’re in the area, I would also recommend taking a detour to visit The Perimeter for the recently opened exhibition by Alexandra Metcalf.

Back on route, head further west to Mayfair to visit Sylvia Kouvali on Bourdon Street for an exhibition by Italian painter Luigi Zuccheri. I’ve not seen these works in person before, but I’m always intrigued by their unsettling depictions of rural scenes, populated by anachronistically larger-than-life animals, plants, and insects. There’s something trippy and dark about these renderings that feels both disorienting and familiar.

From here, walk to Thomas Dane Gallery to see works by Paul Thek. The exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper, alongside a previously unseen notebook of sketches and writings. I’m more familiar with Thek’s sculpture, so I’m really curious to see these more intimate musings of the landscapes, portraits, and cityscapes that formed his immediate surroundings and inner world.

For the East End part of my route, head to Soft Opening for a large group exhibition that deals with ideas around absence and presence, and as Mark Fisher states in his book The Weird and the Eerie, ‘the presence of that which does not belong’. From here, visit Project Native Informant for two exhibitions by Anna Jung Seo and Sean Steadman. Steadman’s work feels like it collapses typical distinctions in painting, possessing a chaotic energy that I look forward to experiencing in the flesh. Wrap up your official gallery weekend around the corner at Herald St, for Kicking Die (To Scale With a Ladder) – a solo exhibition by Michael Dean, rooted in the tenth-century Hindu board game moksha patam, in which players negotiate cycles of death, rebirth, and spiritual attainment, with serpents and ladders – later adapted by British colonists and popularised to become Snakes and Ladders. Tiles make another feature in this exhibition, with materials like concrete and fire-resistant cladding transformed into animal print-like patterns.

Since you’ll be East, I would also recommend visiting the Whitechapel Gallery for Hamad Butt: Apprehension, which opens on the Wednesday before London Gallery Weekend. The recent Donald Rodney show here was a real highlight for me, so I’m looking forward to engrossing myself in this exhibition too. Butt’s work was pioneering and under-celebrated at the time. His conceptual and nuanced handling of queer and diasporic experiences was both poetic and innovative.