At Guts Gallery, Artists Navigate 'The Future of Loneliness'

Despite the unprecedented technologies keeping our globalised world connected, many of us are feeling lonelier than ever. Guts Gallery, an exciting space for emerging artists in London, takes loneliness and intimacy as the subjects of its latest group exhibition.

In 1942, the American artist Edward Hopper painted an image that has come to be associated with urban loneliness: a man, his back to the viewer, sits alone in a diner at night; his isolation underscored by a couple on the far side of the bar engaged in conversation with the waiter. Nighthawks casts loneliness with an alluring sheen, as a marker of strong-silent-type individualism.

The Scottish artist Thomas Cameron's painting Pint and Crisps (2023), which is presented as part of The Future of Loneliness (30 May–25 June 2024) at Guts Gallery, consciously references Hopper's image in a contemporary British scene that is stripped of its mid-century glamour. Here, loneliness is foregrounded by a price tag ('Two Drinks 2 Mains £10') printed onto a misty window, through which we can discern the outline of a figure—or maybe two.

'The transitional spaces of the pub, restaurant, and diner, or this hostel bar in Glasgow', Cameron tells us, 'are reminiscent of the mood and language of Hopper.' Cameron believes the people who populate his nocturnal visions of urban life to be 'representative of the thousands of fleeting moments that pass by as we move through the city.' With a WiFi connection sticker on the window and disco lights on the wall, the figure's sense of loneliness is foregrounded by the tantalising possibilities for connection, and how remote they seem to be.

Curated by Maria Dolfini, the exhibition brings together 11 contemporary artists working in a range of media. It is inspired by Olivia Laing's 2015 essay 'The Future of Loneliness', which considers how, in an age where the internet has transformed how we relate to one another and artificial intelligence promises new forms of connection, we can still feel desire and intimacy. The first half of the one-room gallery concentrates predominantly on paintings that depict loneliness as it is typically conceived: loners and outcasts populate hostile environments, while Norberto Spina depicts an abandoned city park that looks to be in the process of rewilding.

The second half is more eclectic, focused on what Laing calls the 'empty space' where we live 'inside machines and in other people's heads, memories and data streams as well as the flesh.' This section is more daring and sometimes misses the mark: though an intriguing work in its own right, Luisen Enrique Zela-Koort's Desire is a portal (2024), made of stained glass with integrated video, feels a lonely object, like someone who went to the wrong rave and doesn't know anyone.

Resisting cliché depictions of melancholia, the artists portray the chaos of loneliness: here we find images that explore the vulnerability that accompanies a sense of dislocation, of being locked on the outside of something that appears to be 'normal' life. Isolation does not have to be still and quiet; sometimes it can feel like being set alight with kerosene. Above all, the exhibition cleverly disabuses us of the misapprehension that there is merely one form of loneliness.

The show opens with Yage Guo's Ethereal Watcher (2024), a mixed-media painting which depicts a Satanic-like figure against a flame-red backdrop, evoking the anger we often experience at being cast out from a desired realm.

The wish to retreat firmly out of sight, however, is coupled with an intractable need to be seen by others. Though his gaze may be averted, Guo's protagonist still confronts us with the enticing weight of his supernatural physicality. The image captures the vicious cycle of loneliness: the more we retreat into ourselves, the more we become distrustful of the world beyond; a withdrawal that, in turn, intensifies our sense of isolation. It is a cycle that awaits the ideal person who will arrive to break the spell of loneliness. But the breaking of the spell depends on risking a contact that might—as the normal course of intimacy frequently does—go a little awry.

Artist ProfileHenry CurchodView Bio, Works &
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Henry Curchod's Bear hug in a rush (2024) presents a counterpart to Guo's image of satanic outsiderliness: two figures clasp one another in a fleeting, desperate embrace amidst the tangled geometry of an urban scene. Curchod gives us an image of intimacy as fundamentally bewildering and something that, like the city street, rarely can be grasped for long. The two figures, who embody the unease of city life, are adrift in abstract space—like the ambiguous friendship they yearn to occupy, if only they could find the right door to intimacy. The desire for contact is a physical mismatch: a concatenation of limbs that seeks a 'holding environment', as psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott defined it, that lends us the capacity to be alone. Art, for Winnicott, is also one of those holding environments.

Sometimes we can be burdened by the heaviest feelings of loneliness when we are least alone. In Sam King's polychromatic Desire is the Memory of Pleasure (2024), we find ourselves in a chic nightclub where the beautiful people dance with flattering 1980s disco lighting flickering across their faces and multi-coloured ticker-tape raining upon them. But the experience remains somehow solitary: for anyone who has danced alone in a nightclub, or who has wandered down the main thoroughfare of a city where they do not know the language, the painting reminds us that wherever we might be, lost in whatever kind of reverie, we cannot escape ourselves.

Loneliness, we are frequently told, is a sign of our undesirable and sometimes dystopian present. It is a state to weather in the hope of a more hospitable world. In Jungwon Jay Hur's Undertaker (2024), a figure appears stranded in a boat upon a Stygian river. It's an image that dramatises the uncertainty of loneliness as a journey on which both origin and destination seem undetermined. Where are we going? Who might go with us?

In another work, a tiny oil painting entitled In front of our unborn future (2022), Jungwon depicts a woman with an ashen face turning away from an isolated white house in a rural setting. Sometimes we feel the greatest pangs of loneliness when the life we thought we wanted, the one we built with someone else perhaps, seems alien to us. Jungwon's paintings have a truly remarkable capacity to summon feelings of loss and solicitude with a subdued and muted palette. In a corner of the exhibition is a third work by Jungwon. The show's only textile piece, Bojagi (2024) comprises an invitingly slung quilt, in the centre of which is an image of a woman draped over a moon-like rock. The tactile work serves as a reminder of the objects we require to make our unaccommodating world a little more bearable.

More than 80 years since Hopper painted his iconic image of contemporary American life, Laing wrote that '[we] long for contact and it makes us afraid... [but] as long as we're still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.' If critics and commentators have presumed that the future will be a lonely place, then these artists offer recuperative models for intimacy in Laing's sense of the word. This isolation is often thought to be driven by new aspects of digital existence that result in less social forms of living and intimacy, as well as more collective forms of withdrawal.

The Future of Loneliness revisits these anxieties whilst resisting cliché visual signifiers about failed connection. These are works that portray loneliness as stranger than we suspected: hyperreal in Lisa Liljeström's Never Been Sacred and Tell the Truth (both 2024)—lime acrylic screenshots of Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)—and hypnotic in Kate Burling's Evaporation of Turbines (2024), where curvaceous propellers emerge out of an orange seascape that suggests a dystopian future. It all feels at once distinctly familiar and a little different to how it has been envisaged before. The show affords an irresolute picture as to whether our lonely future is a space of delight or terror; it is vibrantly, and a little ecstatically, both. —[O]