Fancy seeing some art shows this month? We’ve done the legwork for you! Here’s our handpicked selection of nine must-see art shows in London this January.
GUTS GALLERY
Hackney Central I 10 January - 4 February I Opening 10 January 18:00 - 20:00
Guts Gallery presents The Body Speaks, a group exhibition that explores how distortion in figuration can be used to plumb the depths of the human psyche.
In The Body Speaks, the human figure takes centre stage. Throughout the exhibition, artists experiment with form, colour, and gestural mark-making to imbue the human figure with the power to express what is usually kept hidden within. Here, inner conflicts, trauma, memories, dreams, and nightmares are transmuted into the visual world and given language through the disruption of the physical body.
More details here.
SAATCHI YATES
Hackney Central I 10 January - 4 February I Opening 15 January 18:00 - 20:00
Angela Santana, a Zurich-born artist, is returning to London with a new exhibition at Saatchi Yates. Two years after her last show at the gallery, Santana is once again showcasing her distinctive exploration of the female form through a fresh body of work that aims to “redefine the representation of the female body.”
Her latest exhibition examines how the body is portrayed in the digital age, engaging with themes of identity and transformation. Drawing on the internet as her muse, Santana challenges traditional depictions of femininity, rejecting classical and conservative conventions. Through large-scale oil paintings, she deconstructs digital media and reimagines its visuals in striking new ways.
STUDIO VOLTAIRE
Clapham I 15 January - 23 March I Opening 14 January 18:00 - 21:00
This new exhibition by Prem Sahib brings together image, text, furniture and sound that centre around and depart from The Backstreet — London’s oldest and longest-running gay leather bar, which closed in 2022 after almost four decades.
Sahib works primarily in sculpture, installation, performance, sound, video and photography. Sahib’s practice embodies a poetic and provocative “destabilised minimalism”, referencing the architecture of public and private queer spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement.
More details here.
AUTOITALIA
Bethnal Green I 16 January - 23 March I Opening 16 January 18:00 - 20:00
Auto Italia presents Safety Curtain, a solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by UK-based artist Alex Margo Arden.
Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, Safety Curtain recovers evidence of recent actions by climate activists in museums and art galleries, considering how such actions change the histories of the artworks they have interjected. The exhibition speaks to the long history of protests in which artefacts have been targeted, including direct action by the suffragettes between 1913 and 1914, along with the vandalism of plaster cast collections during the 1960s student protests. With a new wave of climate activism taking artworks as their aim, tensions between activists and cultural institutions have reemerged, raising questions of value, impact and access.
More details here.
ROSE EASTON
Bethnal Green I 16 January - 1 March I Opening 16 January 18:00 - 20:00
Employing an aesthetic she describes as “Arab kitsch,” the New York based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create works that are united by an elegant marriage of pop culture visuals and potent symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with broader mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American media and culture, in an ongoing exploration of her own experience of living in the diaspora as an Arab woman. The culture of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images on a global scale, is influential on her practice, as is a more art-historical interest in both romance and poetics.
GLASSHOUSE PROJECT I GATHERING
SohoI 24 January - 22 February I Opening 24 January 18:00 - 20:00
VENOM VOYAGE is an immersive installation reminiscent of a travel agency, we are lured by familiar images of adventure, fun, relaxation, only to be confronted with the clash between the reality of toxic, colonized landscapes and our distorted imaginary of them. Christelle Oyiri approaches the subject through the lens of her own personal involvement: her childhood memories of happy holidays in her native country embroiled with what she faces returning as an adult today.
GLASSHOUSE offers those at the beginning of their career, as well as those who have not yet exhibited within the UK, an opportunity to present their work in the heart of Soho alongside Gathering’s main exhibition schedule.
VARIOUS GALLERIES
18 January - 15 February I Preview weekend 18 January - 19 January
Condo takes its name from ‘condominium’ and is a large-scale collaborative exhibition of international galleries. Host galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries – either by co-curating an exhibition together, or dividing their galleries and allocating spaces. The initiative encourages the evaluation of existing models, pooling resources and acting communally to propose an environment that is more conducive for experimental gallery exhibitions to take place internationally.
SARA SADIK: LA POTION (EH)
ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY
Cambridge Heath I 16 January - 1 March I Opening 16 January 18:00 - 20:00
ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is pleased to present La Potion (EH) (2023), a video animation by French artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994). This presentation is part of Illuminated: Moving Image Perspectives, the gallery new digital programme, which will take place over the course of a year, and offer unique insights into new media artists using film, video animation, as well as their latest technological explorations, including blockchain and advanced technologies such as AI.
Sadik’s work seeks to make visible the lives of the Maghrebi youth of France and especially the second-generation emigres from former French colonies of North Africa, who make up 28% of the population of France. Often inspired by real people she knows in her hometown of Marseille the artist explores masculine identity through computer-generated fantasy scenarios. By placing her characters in an imaginary world, she takes them out of the physical reality of contemporary urban life with all its barriers and politics. As Sadik says, “the story exists elsewhere” and a new reality is created for them.
More details here.
ICA
Temple I 14 January - 23 March I Opening 14 January 18:00 - 23:00
New Contemporaries is a unique platform, which provides emerging and early career artists with a wider audience to their work.
The works on show offer an overview of urgent lived concerns, interests and social realities from this generation of artists. Themes include the fluctuations and cycles in the natural world, sustainability and decay; boundaries, borders and fragmented memories; the commodification of mindfulness, self-care, pop culture and consumerism. Other works explore kinship amongst communities, juxtaposed with those that suggest an alienation or ambivalence towards a digitally accelerated world.
More details here.
