Embrace the warmth of September with a wander around some exciting art galleries of East London following our First Thursdays walking route! The route tonight will start as usual from our Gallery and head to four more spaces. The duration of the walk will be around one hour and seventeen minutes.
The first stop is at Haricot Gallery for ‘Up Close and Personal. This show comprises paintings, works on paper, and photography by David Surman, Alfie Kungu, Maisie Cousins, András Ladocsi, Jessica Rose Bird, Kevin Ford, Mingxuan Zhang, and Yulia Zinshtein. The exhibition weaves together the creative narratives of these eight artists, inviting you to delve into a world where intimate details and profound closeness take centre stage. At a time when our attention often gravitates towards the grand and sweeping, this exhibition serves as a captivating reminder to pause, lean in, and immerse ourselves in the intricate beauty of life’s minutiae.
Moving along the walking route, we will arrive at Sarabande Foundation for SUM (today is the last day to see this exhibition), where 11 contemporary artists currently based at Sarabande’s studios in Haggerston, are exhibiting their works at the culmination of their residency. Represented as an inviting house and lush garden, the exhibition is the quintessential allegory for their time spent together. Through collaboration and cohabitation, they have nurtured and grown their practices as well as their relationships with each other. Over the past four weeks, the artists have been welcoming the audience into their ‘home’ to see the exhibition and to experience takeovers, performances and family-style dinners.
Later, the route heads to Alma Pearl for ‘Un respiro y dos parpadeos, or one breath and two blinks‘, the debut exhibition of works by Jhonatan Pulido, comprising a suite of new paintings and works on paper alongside a recent installation. From the Meta province in Colombia, the work of Jhonatan Pulido (b. 1988) originally stems from a desire to synthesise his country’s evolving socio-political context in the wake of the devastation left by Colombia’s Civil War. Pulido’s vibrant and lyrical compositions with bright-pastel qualities speak to the artist’s exploration of abstraction through the lenses of time, memory, place, and the experience of conflict.
The last stop of today is at Soft Opening for Ladder, a show by Tenant of Culture presenting a new body of work that examines the perceived dichotomy between destruction and decoration, interrogating how the aesthetic of waste has, for centuries, been appropriated within the fashion industry. These new wall-based and suspended works highlight the dissonance between the creation of physical waste and the aestheticization of damage. In the exhibition, the artist expands her approach to undoing material, utilising traditional craft techniques based on the extraction or destruction of threads and fibres. These processes include devoré, open work embroidery and slicing as well as deconstructive methods developed through material experimentation to reference the practice in the garment industry of intentionally creating rips or slashes in previously undamaged clothing and accessories.
