The Shock of the Now - Issue #186
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 186 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes four Recommended Exhibitions, as well as eleven fresh Artist Opportunities.
Additionally, tomorrow morning I’ll be publishing The Shock of the Now’s Guide to Regional Institutions for paid subscribers. As August continues, more and more commercial galleries are shutting their doors for the summer break. The UK’s museums and public institutions, however, are capitalising on the longer days and school holidays with their blockbuster summer exhibitions, and in some cases even extended opening hours. Therefore, that in-depth issue will provide insight into the best museum and institutional exhibitions currently on show around the country. I’ve focused on spaces outside of London, in the hope that you might make the most of a day trip or even a staycation, and have included 23 museums/institutions from Glasgow to Gateshead, Liverpool to Leeds, Charleston to Cornwall, Bristol to Birmingham, Manchester to Milton Keynes and more. There are plenty of excellent exhibitions to see, the majority free to visit and most open longer hours and more days than your average commercial gallery, so I have provided full opening hours for each, as well as basic ticketing information. You won’t want to miss it, and I hope it might encourage some summer exhibition excursions!
I hope you enjoy Issue 186, 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 :
Eva Dixon - ‘SCORE’ Solo Exhibition - Split Riviera, Hackney Wick (14th August - 13th September, opening Wednesday 13th August, 6-9pm)
Split Riviera presents Eva Dixon’s solo exhibition ‘SCORE’.
“Drawing upon the artist's family history in trade, her surfaces recall sites of manual labour, converging it with the visual languages of sex, gender and fan culture. Images or logos are applied with force; chained, clamped and penetrating the structure of each work. Dixon’s assemblages instil weight and dimension to the flat picture: she makes ‘things’ — picture or material — look corporeal. In Knock Out, the veins of plastic wrap enclose the flexed muscles of wrestlers. Stretched over, held taut and exposing their frames, Dixon’s works often materialise desire. Desire as a state of suspension. A subtle, unresolved tension of fabric that rivals the immediacy of the erotic image.” - Anna Moss
Alexandre da Cunha & Brian Griffiths - ‘Home with a Man’ Two-Person Exhibition - Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market (15th August - 28th September, opening Thursday 14th August, 6-8pm)
Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents ‘Home with a Man’, a two-person exhibition featuring Alexandre da Cunha and Brian Griffiths.
“Since first exhibiting together in São Paulo in 20021, the pair have reconnected at key points in their careers—across continents, exhibitions, and academic contexts. This exhibition marks a significant chapter in their conversation—a moment of convergence that casts new light on their distinct yet subtly interconnected sculptural practices. Through shared themes of material transformation, narrative tension, and the reordering of the everyday, Home with a Man invites viewers into a layered dialogue between the two artists. Together, they explore domesticity and scripted roles through sculpture, installation, and painting. Home with a Man builds through staged gestures and altered objects – where the domestic life operates as both routine and fantasy, and the ordinary slips into something less certain.” - Elizabeth Xi Bauer
‘We Fell In Love On The Internet’ Group Exhibition - Copeland Park, Peckham (15th - 17th August, opening Thursday 14th August, 6-10pm)
Copeland Park presents ‘We Fell In Love On The Internet’, a group exhibition by art collective Cane-Yo, featuring thirty-six international artists working in figurative painting & drawing in the digital age.
“Cane-Yo is a digital-born international collective of artists formed and connected through Telegram chats, memes, and a mutual obsession with painting technique and visual storytelling. Their work exists at the strange threshold between the analogue and the virtual, taking digital ephemera – screenshots, selfies, copyright-free references – and turning them into painted meditations on perception, connection, and contemporary image culture.” - Copeland Park
Gabriel Phipps - ‘Shower Show’ Solo Exhibition - Three Rooms Gallery, Walthamstow (16th - 25th August, opening Friday 15th August, 5-7:30pm)
Three Rooms Gallery presents Gabriel Phipps’ solo exhibition ‘Shower Show’.
“Shower Show plays on connotations of the word show to explore notions of individual space and public display. This new body of work by Gabriel Phipps examines the borders between public and private - a series of figures are painted in the routine and intimate territory of the shower cubicle.It marks an exciting departure from his previous paintings of people at leisure, entering into a more personal contemplation. We see these people but not in their entirety – the characters are just out of touch, perhaps vulnerable, separated by a veil or screen that takes the form/shape of the water and the surface of the paint. Also a group of ‘Faces’ look outwards, both penetrating and inscrutable.” - Three Rooms Gallery