What to Expect from this Upcoming Artistic Season

Blood in the Grass (1966) by Hannah Ryggen

As the new year starts, a new season for art exhibitions, starting late January all around London is to be expected. The previous year was already filled with wonderful surprises, the new program also has its fair share of exciting artists and thematics to raise your interest. Here is what you can expect from the upcoming exhibition turnover. 

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican

From February 13th to May 5th

Teresa Margolles, American Juju for the Tapestry of Truth (2015)

Following their exhibition Re:Sister exploring gender and Ecology, the Barbican will re-open its main gallery on February 13th with Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, a curation of 50 international artists that examines the way in which textile can be a vehicle to community fundamental ideas and concepts about power, resistance and survival. 

The exhibition includes the work of Pacita Abad (The Philippines), Faith Ringgold (USA), Louise Bourgeois (France / USA) and Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon) amongst others. 

Andrew Pierre Hart: Bio-Data Flows and Other Rhythms – A Local Story at the Whitechapel Gallery

From February 15th to July 7th 

Andrew Pierre Hart, Installing at The Listening Sweet -3- Lagos, 2023. Courtesy the artist

For this season, the Whitechapel Gallery commissioned interdisciplinary London-based  artist Andrew Pierre Hart, whose work intersects between sounds and paintings. This exhibition draws from the gallery’s direct history with migrants and diasporic communities as well as Hart’s examination of the body’s reaction to sound.

Taking the form of an ambient and immersive environment, the show includes some oil paintings, an exclusively-made mural as well as sculpture, a film and a new sound composition.  

Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the Camden Arts Centre

From January 19th to April 14th

Holly Sezer, 'My Greatest Friend', 2023. Oil and acrylic.Image courtesy of the artist.

Celebrating local talents, Bloomberg New Contemporaries is a unique curation of 55 young emerging artists coming out of arts school or alternative learning-programs. As an interdisciplinary exhibition, the show features work examining a large range of contemporary questions such as collectivity, climate change, identity politics and kinship. Some of the mediums used are textile, performance, moving image and paintings. 

Selected by acclaimed artists Helen Cammock, Sunil Gupta and Heather Phillipson, this new Bloomberg New Contemporaries edition comes for the fifth-year in a row to highlight today’s most promising UK-based talents. 

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery

From February 22nd to May 19th

Nanny of the Maroons' Fifth Act of Mercy by Kimathi Donkor (2012) © Kimathi Donkor

Just six months after its highly-anticipated reopening, the National Portrait Gallery comes back with an exhibition exploring the Black Figure through contemporary art. Curated by journalist and former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Ekow Eshun, the show includes work by artists from the African diaspora. 

This show explores the representation, as much as lack, of the Black figure in Western art history while questioning their social, psychological and cultural context. The show includes the work of Lubaina Himid, Titus Kaphar, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Barbara Walker amongst many others. 

When Forms Come Alive at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre

From February 2nd to May 6th

Franz West, Epiphany on Chairs (2011)

Renowned for their highly experimental and contemporary exhibitions, the Haywards Gallery will be revealing an extensive collection of contemporary sculpture spanning over almost sixty years of history. 

Featuring the works of 21 international artists, When Forms Come Alive aims at provoking physical response to the art by exploring gestures, the pleasure of movement and the experience of sensation, all inspired by any kind of mundane movement such as the breaking of the waves or the interlacing of a spider’s web.