The Shock of the Now - Issue #208
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 208 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes fifteen Recommended Exhibitions, as well as twelve fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 208, 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 :
Harry Grundy - ‘Full Pelt’ Solo Exhibition - Incubator, Marylebone (5th February - 1st March, opening Wednesday 4th February, 5:30-7:30pm)
Incubator presents Harry Grundy’s solo exhibition ‘Full Pelt’.
“Incubator is pleased to present Full Pelt, a solo exhibition by Harry Grundy that transforms repetition from industrial rhythm into a language of care. Working across sandpaper drawings, chance-based interventions, and elemental installations, Grundy excavates the inheritances - familial, material, coastal - embedded in patient, process-driven labour. The exhibition’s central thesis unfolds through friction. Grundy’s sandpaper drawings emerge from dragging wood across coarse grain at speeds ranging from 3,000 RPM to barely moving. Some employ belts inherited from a friend who happens to be a woodworker; others bear thick, Jupiter-like bands produced on the original belt sanding machine.” - Incubator
Zachary Merle & Abigail McGinley - ‘All That’s Left Behind’ Two-Person Exhibition - The Florence Trust, Islington (5th February - 5th March, opening Wednesday 4th February, 5-8pm)
The Florence Trust presents Zachary Merle and Abigail McGinley’s two-person exhibition All That’s Left Behind’.
“In this duo exhibition, a shared thread emerges when two distinct visual languages collide. Pictorial foundations become unfastened, gestures leak and pool into one another, repeated images dissolve into feeling, and the flickering shadow of a half-forgotten memory resurfaces. Meaning is neither fixed nor resolved, but allowed to hover — fragile, partial, and in-flux. Working in their respective practices, Merle and McGinley are united by an abdication of certainty. Their works resist clarity in favour of restlessness, embracing ambiguity as both method and subject. Within this state of disquiet, moments of quietude are found — spaces where disclosure and concealment coexist.” - The Florence Trust
‘In chests, nests and shells’ Group Exhibition - Night Café, Fitzrovia (5th February - 6th March, opening Wednesday 4th February, 6-8pm)
Night Café presents ‘In chests, nests and shells’, a group exhibition featuring work by George Richardson, Lavinia Harrington and Steffen Kern.
“Taking a poetic reading of spaces, the exhibition considers them not as a site of function or utility, but as a place loaded by emotion, memory, and imagination. A sentence in poetry and a sentence in prose both consist of letters forming words, and we recognise them as such. Yet they operate differently. Prose is functional: it communicates directly, describes, or explains. Poetry is not. It works indirectly, through emotion, rhythm, and symbolism rather than literal meaning. It asks not simply to be understood rationally, but to be felt. The difference between prose and poetry might help us to understand how a rational analysis falls short to fully grasp certain spaces. You can focus on the geometrical objects of planes and right angles or the structures or the structural engineering that keeps it all in place. And yes, all of that is correct. But the inhabited space transcends all of it.” - Night Café
Sophie Vallance Cantor - ‘Enemies to Lovers but Me to Myself’ Solo Exhibition - Miłość, Haggerston (5th February - 14th March, opening Thursday 5th February, 6-9pm)
Miłość presents Sophie Vallance Cantor’s solo exhibition ‘Enemies to Lovers but Me to Myself’.
“In the show, Sophie’s oil paintings take on a new form of room dividers, illustrating experiences of autism and burnout – of recovery and grounding, of hiding and not wanting to be seen, of lashing out in pain, of boundaries and safety. In their small London home studio, the paintings Sophie and her partner and fellow painter Douglas Cantor make often feel stacked on top of each other – the room dividers translate that feeling, becoming a sort of spatial collages. They conceal and protect, they form a boundary which echoes the artist’s experience of autism, which can often feel like looking in from the outside. Sophie’s paintings offer a refuge to exist in, and now a literal hiding place.” - Miłość
Jill Tate - ‘Self-Fulfillment’ Solo Exhibition - Seventeen, Haggerston (6th February - 21st March, opening Thursday 5th February, 6-9pm)
Seventeen presents Jill Tate’s solo exhibition ‘Self-Fulfillment’.
“Jill Tate’s exhibition is an arrangement of painted panels, warm with earth tones and soft rounded edges. We are presented with atmospheric scenes with heavily contrasting shadows and unseen light sources. The images depict objects and scenarios that are instantly human in their concerns, a stack of empty boxes, unoccupied chairs and benches, a telephone off the hook, an upturned bowl spilling its contents. Figures though are conspicuously absent, actions or recent events are implied but it’s unclear who may have instigated them.” - Seventeen