London Gallery Shows to See, February 2024
Exhibition view: Yu Ji, Protrude, Sadie Coles HQ, Bury Street, London, (1 February–9 March 2024). © Yu Ji. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison.
This February, London's major art institutions are opening highly anticipated shows, including Tate Modern's survey of Yoko Ono's practice, The Courtauld's retrospective of Frank Auerbach's charcoal portraits, and Serpentine Galleries hosting of a highly anticipated Barbara Kruger solo exhibition.
Running alongside the great institutional line-up are shows at commercial galleries dedicated to young artists working across a variety of media and cultural perspectives. These are five London exhibitions to see this coming month.
Yu Ji: Protrude
Sadie Coles HQ, 8 Bury Street
1 February–9 March 2024
Expect: monumental sculptures and works on paper exploring the fragile relationship between body and landscape.
Protrude is Yu Ji's second solo exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ. The exhibition speaks to ever-present conflicts within the body—between routine and desire, vulnerability and permanence, and reliability and chaos.
Ji's practice tackles themes of placehood, cultural histories of everyday locations, and how human bodies interact with the natural spaces they inhabit. The artist is known for her live performance interventions, video pieces, and site-specific totemic installations, which respond to their location and draw out embedded narratives.
For Protrude, Ji created two new soap-and-concrete sculptures that tower over visitors, measuring over two metres tall. On view is also a new series of works on paper that investigate the relationship between buildings, bodies, and the natural world.
Anna Barriball: New Drawings
Frith Street Gallery, 17–18 Golden Square
2 February–14 March 2024
Expect: new drawings that explore light, memory, and the history of photography.
Anna Barriball is a significant figure in U.K. contemporary art, featured in the New Contemporaries exhibition in 2000 and with four works in Tate's collection. New Drawings debuts her latest body of work, focusing on the medium's importance within her practice.
Barriball's work examines daily elements—windows, brick walls, doors—that are rarely actively acknowledged. Recontextualising their presence in our lives, she transforms these objects into visual poems, drawing on minimalist and conceptual influences.
New Drawings includes pieces that capture the windows of her Victorian studio and a new series of small-scale 'hand-held' drawings, made up of layers of pastel, wax, and delicately applied graphite powder.
Abraham Kritzman and Daniel Silver: Choir
Elizabeth Xi Bauer, 8–12 Creekside
2 February–30 March 2024
Expect: paintings and sculptures by two artists who explore how our bodies take up and take in space.
Marking the first time Daniel Silver is exhibiting at Deptford's Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery and the first shared exhibition for Silver and Abraham Kritzman, Choir celebrates both artists' dedication to exploring the human form and condition.
Both artists play with the language of painting and sculpture. Silver's multimedia sculptural practice is informed by ancient histories, Freudian psychoanalysis, and abstraction. His sculptures are made in 'family' groups, and their relationships build on their impact as individual pieces.
Kritzman's work investigates the boundaries between the natural and artificial, pulling apart our understanding of the man-made. Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and print, Kritzman's pieces are influenced by mythical narratives and his travels around the world.
Stewart Swan: Square Go
RHODES, 65 Great Portland Street
2 February–2 March 2024
Expect: portraits inspired by characters the artist encountered in his home city.
Square Go is the debut solo show of Scottish artist Stewart Swan, whose grotesque characters have been compared to Charles Bukowski's for how their physical features denote their emotional state.
Swan lives and works in Glasgow, a city renowned for toughness and grit. The show's title references these traits, 'square go' being Scottish slang for a brawl. Yet, Swan captures a particular brand of Glaswegian humour in his often-snarling characters.
The artist's gentle treatment of his figures—made by applying several layers of oil paint, which are then tenderly carved into and etched by the artist during the drying process—conveys their deep emotional complexity. Against soft pastel backgrounds, Swan's characters demand that we deeply consider their hidden emotionality.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden: A MERCY | DUMMY
White Cube, 144–152 Bermondsey Street
14 February–24 March 2024
Expect: a confrontation and condemnation of racial and gendered violence across two bodies of work that examine its consequences.
Artist and filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden's debut show at White Cube will display two bodies of work, both inspired by influential texts.
'A MERCY' shares its title with American writer Toni Morrison's 2008 novel. In her series, McClodden examines 'a brutal act of mercy' carried out within an inherently violent system—as Morrison does in her book—with painted steel head gates, a barrier commonly used to restrain livestock ahead of slaughter.
'DUMMY' is inspired by Jean Genet's 1958 play The Blacks: A Clown Show. McClodden describes her immersive installation as a 'one-act play', featuring a leather dummy protagonist. The dummy, a recipient of brutality, will be accompanied by leather paintings referencing traditional African masks. —[O]
