Exorcism, social abstraction, mythical Afrofuturism and autobiographical sculptures, July's exhibitions have it all!
From the sunlit streets of Beverly Hills to London's bustling metropolis, renowned galleries and institutions like Gagosian, Sir John Soane's Museum and Richard Saltoun Gallery, will delight visitors by spotlighting artists such as Lina Iris Viktor and Penny Slinger. Read on to discover our selection of exhibitions to see this month.
Social Abstraction
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
July 18 - August 30
Antwaun Sargent, the author behind the sensational photography book and touring exhibition: The New Black Vanguard (2019), has cast his curatorial eye to Gagosian's gallery space in Beverly Hills. Like his book, the two-part exhibition spotlights the creativity of Black artists across different mediums. While some artists paint in oils and acrylics, others use ceramics, hair glue, mosaics, resins, textiles, wigs, and materials charged with conceptual and cultural significance. Skilled creatives such as Kyle Abraham, Kevin Beasley, Allana Clarke, Theaster Gates and Rick Lowe, move between and beyond the poles of abstraction and figuration. They form shapes to become landscape and cityscape, colour to reveal people and explore the limits of perception, and texture to map the totality of lived experience. Lowe’s collage painting Cavafy Remains (2024), for example, is dedicated to Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) and spans twenty-eight feet in length. Social Abstraction will be followed this fall by a second iteration in Hong Kong.
Harvest Slab (Pane I), 2024 by Kevin Beasley © Kevin Beasley Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Casey Kaplan, and Gagosian
Lina Iris Viktor: Mythic Time & Tens of Thousands of Rememberings
Sir John Soane's Museum, London
June 10 - January 19
You may remember Lina Iris Viktor from 2022's In The Black Fantastic exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It was there that British visitors viewed and internalised the New-York based artist's powerful multimedia works; drawing on artistic traditions and visual influences from African symbolism and cosmology. Viktor's oeuvre includes sculpture, painting, photography and gilding; combining each medium to create impactful portraits often depicting herself. The decision to show at Soane's is fitting, as both gallery and artist possess an eclectic approach to collecting objects from varied cultures and time periods. For this exhibition, the latter has fused together motifs and materials together to immerse visitors in "a Mythic Time" of Viktor's own creation.
Lina Iris Viktor: Mythic Time & Tens of Thousands of Rememberings. The Foyle Space at Sir John Soane's Museum. Photo by Gareth Gardner
Penny Slinger: Exorcism: Inside Out
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
June 03 - September 07
Penny Slinger is a pioneering LA-based, London-born Feminist Surrealist. Accompanied by an extended version of her iconic book: An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (1977), Slinger's exhibition Exorcism: Inside Out is a baptism of fire into her hauntingly surreal world. An Exorcism's development began in 1969, and was completed over approximately 7 years. Often described as the artist's magnum opus, the project is composed of a collection of erotic collages set inside an empty mansion known to her then-partner, Peter Whitehead.
Penny Slinger began her career as one of the few celebrated women artists in the "Swinging London" of the late 1960s. Graduating from Chelsea College of Art in 1969, she's best known for photo-collages foregrounding the female body and sexuality in a radical and unapologetic manner. Each piece aims, in Slinger's own words, "to bring the inside out and the outside in" and to create "a new language for the feminine psyche to express itself." However, her visceral work was not always accepted by others and, in 1978, her collage book: Mountain Ecstasy (Dragon’s Dream, March 1978, Holland) was seized and burned by British customs for being deemed pornographic. With its exhibition, Richard Saltoun Gallery celebrates all the controversial nuances of Slinger's world with an all-immersive audio-visual environment.
Memory, 1969 by Penny Slinger. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery
Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences
Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London
July 10 - December 08
Turner-Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry needs no introduction. Visitors to his exhibition at the Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery can expect an array of his typically satirical multimedia pieces. Colourfully designed and nostalgic, they crystallise the human aspects of contemporary life: identity, gender, social status, sexuality and religion. Autobiographical references—to the artist’s childhood, his family, and his cross-dressing—can be read in tandem with questions about décor and decorum, class and taste, and the status of the artist versus that of the artisan. For the first time, the exhibition brings the artist’s six large-scale tapestries to a building where William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) A Rake’s Progress (1735), the inspiration behind Perry’s tapestries, were purchased and displayed. Perry invites visitors to consider their own connections with the tapestries’ vivid storytelling and rich, allegorical imagery.
Grayson Perry, Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Grayson Perry
Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024
National Portrait Gallery, London
June 11 - October 27
Rejoice! The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award has returned to the National Portrait Gallery for 2024. The prestigious competition showcases the very best in contemporary portrait painting and is open to everyone aged eighteen and over. Since its inception over 40 years ago, the competition has attracted over 40,000 entries from more than 100 countries, and the exhibition has been seen by over 6 million people.
This year's first prize winner is Antony Williams, a past exhibitor at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Smithsonian Institute in Washington and, most recently, at Messums in London. His egg tempera portrait Jacqueline with Still Life (2020), combines the artist's interest in still life with portraiture. The second prize went to Isabella Watling and her painting Zizi (2023), featuring a tattooed model in a pale pink Simone Rocha dress. The third prize went to the Ethiopian-inspired Catherine Chambers for Lying (2020). Along with other prestigious prizes like the Young Artist award, this display of emerging talent is not one to miss.
Double Portrait of Clara, 2021 by Michael Slusakowicz. Shortlisted for the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Nabilah Nordin: Primary Matter
parrasch heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles
July 13 - August 10
The Los Angeles, CA-based artist Nabilah Nordin creates captivating sculptures imbued with internal buoyancy. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery parrasch heijnen, both spotlights and enhances the fluid creative process behind each piece. There is a vibrant assemblage of shapes, a combination of raw earth with new world materials, and organic yet constructed forms which unfurl, topple, grow, and balance. When observed together, the works blur the lines between the natural and the manufactured. Using “skins” which adapt to their given environment, Nordin investigates the relationship between surfaces and materials. “The pretence of how things appear: what may look like a stone object, or a rusted chunk of metal is actually the ‘skin’ pretending and performing as something else,” she explains.
Nabilah Nordin, Molten Slayer, 2022. Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks (7–10 September 2023). Sydney Contemporary. Photo: Wes Nel
