London Gallery Weekend is the biggest and most inclusive gallery weekend in the world, and that is reflective of the incredible, breadth and size of the gallery sector in London. It's returning this year for its 5th edition and runs from the 6th to the 8th of June.
It brings together 126 contemporary art galleries, spanning the city, and the 3 days reflect that. On the Friday, we focus on Central London, Saturday is South London and Sunday is East London, and that means that we can spotlight the evolving landscape across the city with a moment for each one.
What's wonderful is that every year new galleries are opening across the city. For example, there are 15 new participants to London Gallery Weekend, 11 of whom are newly established galleries.
So this is an initiative that really can highlight the evolution of the contemporary gallery sector in London. London Gallery Weekend is an event that's focused on broadening public awareness of the commercial galleries spanning the city. Of course they offer year-round programming of exhibitions and events that are free to the public, but the public doesn't necessarily know that it's there for them - it's a very different offering that you would get in a commercial gallery to what you would have, on offering a museum.
So it's a chance to have this spotlight on the broader spectrum of global contemporary artistic practice on our doorstep, and also encourage people to go beyond their usual gallery-going pathways.
It's an incredibly varied program, all free, for the public, And because there's so much choice, we've devised a few ways to help visitors, choose their route. The easiest thing is to visit the London Gallery Weekend website because you can there search geographically according to where you want to visit, or the kind of art you want to see. You can plot your own route.
Each year we have a different range of people, doing their curated routes to give some inspiration. Here are a few of those and other highlights:
Cornelia Parker
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She is best known for transforming everyday objects like knives and forks into extraordinary works of art and really pushing the boundaries of what we understand sculpture to be.
She had a fantastic exhibition at Tate Britain a few years ago, but now you can see her new works at the gallery that represents her, Frith Street Gallery, which is in the heart of Soho.
You'll be able to discover her new paintings that are inspired by historic newspaper covers and color charts to create her own color grids. It has an amazing visual effect, and it's a whole new way of considering the role of the artist palettes in their work, and the makeup of paint itself. For example, she's using fossilised dinosaurs ground down to create pigments to paint with.
Sir Antony Gormley
His Royal Academy exhibition was an incredible survey of his work, but his current gallery show is at White Cube, and it brings together a selection of his very earliest works.
It takes us right back to the origins of his practice, and it's a really incredibly intimate setting to see the works in. These works are from the mid 1970s and they were developed amid the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, and are really among the most iconic of Antony's career. You can trace how his early experimentations lay laid the groundwork for his subsequent bodies of work.
The Hannah Barry Gallery
And Hannah, as well as running the gallery, she runs Bold Tendencies in Peckham. We're coinciding with the opening of their summer season at there as well as her new exhibition at the Hannah Barry Gallery; it’s called The Garden by Harley Weir, and she's a self-taught photographer who uses both analog and digital techniques, experimentation in the darkroom, to create these amazing compositions.
She's looking at reshaping the ideas of womanhood and how the female gaze might be engaged with and made new in our current era.
The Lisson Gallery
There’s a show here called Finding My Blue Sky, which is a love letter to London by its curator, Omar Kholeif . It brings together an amazing selection of artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Famaam and Barbara Walker, to name just a few.
All of the works are united by a universal sentiment of our search for a sense of belonging, and posing the question, what is the world that you dream of?
What's lovely about this show as well is it extends beyond the gallery halls outside into the streets that lie just behind the edge of a road. There are these large murals by Lubaina Himid outside on the walls.
Curated route: Sabato de Sarno
Each year we have a different range of people, doing their curated routes to give some inspiration. Sabato de Sarno is an inspired creative director in fashion, formerly Gucci, and before that, Valentino, Dolce Gabbana, and Prada. He will be starting his route in Mayfair, and he's honed in on Pace Gallery retrospective of the Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray.
I think it's the first exhibition of the artist's work in London and it previews what's to come at Tate Modern's major exhibition of her work in July.
And then Sabato has some great recommendations on a route south, ending his gallery hop at Soup where there's an installation by Tulani Hlalo. It's an outlandish collection of textiles and moving images and sculptures inspired by the niche subculture of competitive dog grooming.
Curated route: Tarini Malik
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Tarini Malik is not only a curator at the Royal Academy, but last year she was a curator for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
She has focused in her curated route on internationalism as one of London's greatest assets. It includes the first UK exhibition of paintings by artist Paul Thek at Thomas Dane Gallery. These are really beautiful dreamlike landscapes, and cityscapes that offer sort of very delicate meditation on life.
And then Tarini is actually going to be among the live events during the weekend, with a talk at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery which is on Dover Street. She's doing that with the artist Jordan Casteel, who is coming over to London specially. Jordan's work was recently shown in the fantastic National Portrait Gallery exhibition, The Time Is Always Now, where artists reframe black history.
Curated tour: Jasleen Kaur
Last year's Turner Prize winner has she shared her route and I think it's always really revelatory to have insights from artists as to which other artist works they're looking at. Her route is also reflective of of London Gallery Weekend because it spans south, central to east, and takes in both well-known artists as well as new discoveries.
Among her hot tips is Rae-Yen Song’s exhibition at William Hine in Camberwell. This debut London show is ahead of the artist's largest institutional exhibition to date, at Tramway in Glasgow. For this exhibition, the artist takes inspiration from microorganisms that inhabit the pond in in their family home in Edinburgh, and they're those are invisible to the naked eye but through a partnership with a microbiologist Song has generated imagery of these life forms and transform them into maximal ceramic sculptures. They're absolutely wonderful.
