Tabish Khan, the @LondonArtCritic, picks his top exhibitions to see across London in July. If you are looking for more exhibitions, check out his previous top 5.
These giant works, suspended in the gallery space, are filled with horror and drama, referencing William Blake and Francisco Goya. What’s even more impressive is that the technique involves cutting out individual segments of the drawing, painting them separately, and then stitching the Japanese washi paper back together to create striking contrasts between the segments. The smaller-scale paintings on tiles work well alongside the much larger works. Until 25th July.
Keith Piper was one of the founding members of the BLK Art Group in the 1980s, and many of his works feel just as relevant today. His four horsemen of the apocalypse may feature Ronald Reagan, but it’s not as if subsequent presidents have reduced the appetite for war, and the other horsemen include a general and a businessman, two vectors of the military-industrial complex with vested interests in perpetual war. The waving of flags and the blame falling on those of a different skin colour features in Piper’s work, and we can see it playing out in the UK right now. Until 25th July.
The manosphere gets a satirical takedown in Daniel Hosego’s latest series, where Andrew Tate takes the place of the wise centaur Chiron, spreading his toxic masculinity. A centaur with ripped abs lifts weights, with beta males on laptops on either side of him, while Perseus is trying to shave Andromeda to remove the body hair that women are often stigmatised for. It’s a great merger of art historical references with playful humour, satire and innuendo. Until 25th July.
This exhibition is set around the river Thames, as Liane Lang’s images are printed onto the cast-off materials from modern-day crucibles used for making sculpture, to tiles from the Great Fire of London in 1666, complete with holes for the wooden pegs that would have propagated the fire. The river was once the heart of London’s industry, and now Lang is using its materials to print a contemporary history upon them. Until 25th July.
These are fantastic layered paintings that tell stories about the artist’s upbringing and how his dyslexia steered him away from the academic path expected of him. It also references wider cultural elements, including churches and West African spirituality, and their links to colonialism. The paintings incorporate modern technology, with hard drive parts and cables embedded in the paintings as the current vessels of knowledge. Until 23rd July.
All images are copyrighted and courtesy of the respective artist and gallery. William Hine photo: Damian Griffiths. Liane Lang photo: BJ Deakin Photography.
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Art Critic for both FAD and Londonist. See as many exhibitions as possible and write reviews, opinion pieces and a weekly top 5 for FAD.