The Shock of the Now - Issue #185
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 185 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes eight Recommended Exhibitions, as well as eleven fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 185, 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 :
‘Not a House but a Memory’ Group Exhibition - Rosenfeld, Fitzrovia (6th August - 12th September, opening Wednesday 6th August, 6-8pm)
Gallery Rosenfeld presents ‘Not a House but a Memory’, a group exhibition featuring Rebekka Homann, Anna Pakosz, Lanfranco Quadrio, Sam Llewellyn-Jones, Araminta Blue, Bongsu Park, Maya Silverberg, Martina Cinotti and Li Ramet.
“Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’, Not a House but a Memory explores how domestic space holds memory, identity, and emotional inheritance. Bachelard writes, ‘The house protects the dreamer. The house allows one to dream in peace.’ Here, the house is not a fixed or stable place. It is open and fluid, filled with feelings of care, absence, and remembrance. Materiality is central to the works on show. Each artist uses physical materials to evoke memory and personal experience, reflecting on the histories that shape how we live and feel at home.” - Rosenfeld
Sarah Muirhead - ‘A Ghost Only You Can Name’ Solo Exhibition - Pontone Gallery, Fitzrovia (7th - 30th August, opening Thursday 7th August, 6-8pm)
Pontone Gallery presents Sarah Muirhead’s solo exhibition ‘A Ghost Only You Can Name’.
“Sarah Muirhead builds paintings on the unstable ground of memory. The brief, flickering moments we return to again and again, until they become something else. A myth. An echo. A ghost only you can name. Known for her psychologically intense, voyeuristic-toned portraiture, Muirhead moves away from the face here to explore the body in fragments. The focus shifts to hands, feet and jewellery - details that carry the haunting weight of scenes we return to. Her work is less about portraying people as they were, but about how they linger in the mind: dramatised, distorted, and embellished - made sacred in their retelling. She constructs these visions - part truth and longing - as perhaps more vivid in recollection than in life. The act of painting, like remembering, becomes sanctified not because it reveals truth, but because of the care and attention it requires.” - Pontone Gallery
‘The Wicker Arms’ Group Exhibition - Staffordshire St, Peckham (8th - 31st August, opening Thursday 7th August, 6-9pm)
Staffordshire St presents ‘The Wicker Arms’, a group exhibition curated by artist ha.lf and the icing room, featuring Milly Aburrow, Haydn Albrow, Henrietta Armstrong, Isobel Atacus, Hannah Bays, Camilla Bliss, Flora Bradwell, Emma Carlow, Charlie Chesterman, Boudicca Paloma, Laura Copsey, Denise Hickey, Paul Kindersley, Kenji Lim, Brighid Lowe, Lindsey Mendick, Eleanor McLean, Taryn O’Reilly, Heidi Pearce, Sophie Popper, Anna Sebastian and Jesse Warby.
“Incorporating work from 20 artists, The Wicker Arms materially explores ideas around community, through which we refocus narratives of belonging. The suggestion of folk horror adds an edge to this narrative, where alternative realities creep to the surface, as a possible manifestation of a collective (un)conscious. Indeed, folk horror invites us to reimagine the pub, upend its more traditional associations, and reclaim it as a third space. If The Wicker Arms is haunted by The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973), it also gestures towards wider craft practices, landscape, and folklore. The tension between a nostalgic past, and a troubling present, bubbles to the surface through the show.” - Staffordshire St
‘Showing Off’ Group Exhibition - Studio 1.1, Shoreditch (7th - 31st August, opening Thursday 7th August, 6-9pm)
Studio 1.1 presents ‘Showing Off’, a group exhibition featuring Katie Eraser, Abbie Horberry, Jordan Mckenzie and Boudicca Paloma.
“A meticulous depiction of seen reality, a submission to the transformative processes of paint itself, the manipulation of those processes, an accumulation of scraps of the real world; is it disingenuous to look for links between artists who have shared a studio together for the last year? Painters who have all subscribed to the Turps Programme? Do we need to create liaisons, rationalise disparities in the cause of a (bogus) unifying theme? Four painters who could loosely be described as dealing with (in the broadest sense) decoration. From elaborate restraint through scattergun lightness of touch to downright kitsch. A spectrum far too neat that each bucks in turn. Mckenzie’s accretive junk hoarding and reactive assemblage; Horberry’s restrained hard-won surfaces – layering oil paint with intricate texture surfaces, taking the flowery out of the flourish; Paloma’s fun fur that almost repels – both as a fetish object and symbol of power; Eraser’s weightless collages delighting in chance discovery with rhythymic layers of transparent colour.” - Studio 1.1
‘Pedigree’ Group Exhibition - OHSH Projects, The Bottle Factory, Old Kent Road (7th August - 21st September, opening Thursday 7th August, 5-9pm)
OHSH Projects presents ‘Pedigree’ at The Bottle Factory, a group exhibition featuring Kristoffer Axén, Masha Barks, David Cooper, Samantha Fellows, Jacob Freeman, Michael Gao, Lee Grandjean, Nicola Hicks, Tulani Hlalo, Lisa Ivory, Reece Jones, Eloise Peggy Knight, Jacopo Naccarato, Claire Partington, Irena Posner, Kit Reynolds, David Surman, and Becky Tucker.
“When we look into the eyes of a dog – tranquil or snarling – do we catch a glimpse of ourselves? PEDIGREE is a group exhibition that examines how the domesticated dog reflects the instincts, structures and contradictions of human behaviour. Dogs have long held a mirror to human nature. Domesticated over millennia, they have been shaped not just by evolution but by the desires, fears and fantasies of the people who live beside them. This exhibition explores the complex relationship between humans and dogs, where affection is often entangled with control, and loyalty with legacy. The works on view consider how dogs, once wild predators, have been bred into symbols of comfort, status or sentiment. Through painting, sculpture and installation, the show reflects on themes of training, identity and transformation, asking how much of what we see in a dog is a projection of ourselves.” - OHSH Projects