The Shock of the Now - Issue #162
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 162 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes twenty Recommended Exhibitions, as well as eleven fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 162, and if so do forward it along! As always, questions and comments are welcome, so feel free to get in touch, H x
Recommended Exhibitions Opening This Week :
Aileen Murphy - ‘Crackers for Lorelei’ Solo Exhibition - Amanda Wilkinson, Farringdon (26th February - 5th April, opening Wednesday 26th February, 6-8pm)
Amanda Wilkinson presents Aileen Murphy’s solo exhibition ‘Crackers for Lorelei’, supported by Culture Ireland.
“In her distinctive approach to painting, Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy’s paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer’s eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality of the medium. The paintings have evolved through Murphy’s experimental exploration of paint. In her hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealed only to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true.” - Amanda Wilkinson
Prunella Clough and Deborah Lerner - ‘thank you for dinner’ Two-Person Exhibition - Flexitron, Angel (27th February - 5th April, opening Wednesday 26th February, 6-8pm)
Flexitron presents ‘thank you for dinner’, a two-person exhibition of work by Prunella Clough and Deborah Lerner.
“This exhibition marks the halfway point of Deborah Lerner’s research into the seminal British artist, Prunella Clough. Over the last eighteen months Lerner has travelled to 33 public institutions across the UK to study the work of Clough. This exhibition shows a selection of works by Lerner made in response to these research trips alongside paintings, drawings and prints by Clough herself which have been kindly loaned by a number of private collectors that she has met during this time.” - Flexitron
Dada Khanyisa - ‘this is for you’ Solo Exhibition - Sadie Coles, Davies Street, Mayfair (26th February - 12th April, opening Wednesday 26th February, 6-8pm)
Sadie Coles presents Dada Khanyisa’s solo exhibition ‘this is for you’.
“In their first exhibition at Sadie Coles, Dada Khanyisa presents a group of ‘sculptural paintings’ that look to their immediate community in Cape Town, popular culture, and Khanyisa’s extensive research into the social and political histories of South Africa, producing lively figurative assemblages that convey the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary life. Throughout their labour-intensive practice – incorporating hand carved wood, meticulously compiled sculptural elements and found objects, and painted backdrops borrowed from candid or historic photographic sources – Khanyisa expresses interpersonal dynamics through the lens of their social observations and lived experience.” - Sadie Coles HQ
Lexia Hachtmann - ‘Out Of The Plain’ Solo Exhibition - Hew Hood, Shoreditch (27th February - 22nd March, opening Thursday 27th February, 6-8pm)
Hew Hood presents Lexia Hachtmann’s solo exhibition ‘Out Of The Plain’.
“Lexia Hachtmann’s Out Of The Plain unfolds in a landscape of wandering, where signs flicker between disclosure and concealment: two ivory flags, a dead flower, a ship anointed with eyes. The exhibition takes the artist’s trip to Malta as a point of departure – an island shaped by centuries of conquest and exchange. Hachtmann encounters a place dense with overwritten histories, shifting mythologies and fractured narratives – half-recognised yet ultimately indecipherable to her as a visitor to a foreign land.” - Sophie Barshall
Alia Ahmad - ‘Fields / ميادين’ Solo Exhibition - White Cube, Mason's Yard, St James’s (28th February - 5th April, opening Thursday 27th February, 6-8pm)
White Cube presents Alia Ahmad’s solo exhibition ‘Fields / ميادين’.
“Ahmad’s vibrant, expressionistic paintings draw inspiration from memories and observations of her native Riyadh; informed by local textiles, poetry, calligraphy, digital graphics and the rich diversity of the surrounding industrialised desert landscape and plant life.” - White Cube