What to See During Condo London 2024
After a four-year hiatus, Condo London has returned with a successful opening weekend.
The brainchild of Vanessa Carlos, director of Carlos/Ishikawa, the event involves leading commercial galleries in the city sharing their space with an offshore international colleague. This year, 50 galleries took part, showing work across 23 venues in what is effectively a giant city-wide 'exhibition'.
With a focus on collaboration rather than competition and a more accessible participation cost, the event creates opportunities for young galleries, newcomer artists, and experimentation. The result is an exciting programme of art.
Ocula Advisors select the must-see shows to catch before they close on 17 February 2024, including presentations at The Sunday Painter, Ginny on Frederick, Sadie Coles HQ, Amanda Wilkinson, and Modern Art.
Ginny on Frederick hosting LOMEX Gallery: David Flaugher and Francesca Dolor
Ginny on Frederick, one of London's most exciting gallery spaces in recent years, is hosting New York-based LOMEX Gallery for an exhibition of paintings by Francesca Dolor and David Flaugher.
Flaugher's paintings present stark and strange interiors, where tables and chairs are encroached on by mysterious floating spirals. In contrast, Dolor's paintings showcase rainbow-coloured landscape panoramas busy with symmetrical patterns.
Despite their different styles, both artists have a flair for the hallucinatory. These mostly imagined landscapes elicit a sense of curiosity and unease, luring us into luminous realms that encourage contemplation.
Both Flaugher and Dolor craft worlds where it's hard to discern whether we have been there before, or merely dreamed of being there.
The Sunday Painter hosting The Breeder: Ekene Stanley Emecheta and Deborah Segun
The Sunday Painter is hosting a two-person painting exhibition with Athens-based gallery The Breeder. Founded in 2002 as an offshoot of The Breeder magazine, the Greek gallery emerged to further artistic dialogue between Athens and the global art scene.
On view are works by Ekene Stanley Emecheta and Deborah Segun. Both artists navigate the intricacies of the human experience, depicting faces and bodies that pull you in and nudge you towards conversations about gender, race, and identity.
Segun's paintings are vibrantly coloured with simple forms. The shapes slot together like jigsaw puzzles, forming portraits of Black women leaning into one another. With a joyful palette of sugary pink, mint green, and lemon yellow, the paintings radiate positivity.
While Segun emphasises skin colour, Emecheta paints his figures in a ghostly white wash. This eerie visual prompts us to look beyond the surface, and consider the narrative behind the identity on view, rather than its initial appearance.
Sadie Coles HQ hosting KAYOKOYUKI: Nobuya Hitsuda, Yutaka Nozawa, Emi Otaguro, and Masanori Tomita
Powerhouse gallery Sadie Coles HQ is teaming up with Tokyo gallery KAYOKOYUKI to present a group show of Japanese artists in central London.
On view are works by Nobuya Hitsuda, Yutaka Nozawa, Emi Otaguro, and Masanori Tomita.
Tomita's dense abstract paintings, featuring half-dissolved patterns, could be mistaken for a close-up of a Gustav Klimt painting. His interplay of complex patterns, where vivid purple and pink tones overlap, create a deeply textured surface reminiscent of fish scales.
Hitsuda's paintings portray more recognisable forms—landscapes dotted with wire fences, building frames, and pylons. They suggest development and progress at a time when Japan's economy continues to languish.
Another highlight is Otaguro's work Sun Bath (2020), a ceramic sculpture disguised as a stick of gum. Otaguro has infused the work with realism; from its curled-up form to the pale peach colour and the zigzag imprints of a gum wrapper.
Amanda Wilkinson hosting Galerie Sultana: Nanténé Traoré
Around the corner from the Barbican Centre, Amanda Wilkinson hosts Paris-based participants Galerie Sultana, who are presenting a collection of photographs by Nanténé Traoré.
Traoré's tender work captures intimate human moments.
In universe (2022), you find a spectrum of colours saturating a tattooed figure whose outstretched arm partially covers their face. The image is slightly blurred, which is part of what makes it feel so honest—it's as if the photograph was taken spontaneously, a fleeting decision in a quiet moment.
Traoré documents his subjects up close and personal in their own environments. Traoré's life is thus intertwined with the lives of his subjects, offering insight into how he narrates their stories with such feeling and authenticity.
Modern Art hosting Gallery Artbeat: Nika Kutateladze
Modern Art has joined forces with Tbilisi-based Gallery Artbeat to bring together a solo exhibition of paintings by Nika Kutateladze.
Visitors are invited to see Kutateladze's unsettling paintings, where figures with mauve-toned skin and multiple eyes peer outward with a vacant gaze.
Kutateladze's haunting paintings explore themes of isolation in rural Georgia, the artist's homeland. Through his portraits, the boundary between man and nature blurs, and his subjects dissolve into the wilderness.
Main image: Deborah Segun, My Source of Joy (2023) (detail). Acrylic on canvas. 120 x 160 cm. Courtesy the artist, The Sunday Painter, London and The Breeder, Athens.
