{"id":154497,"date":"2025-06-03T09:54:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T09:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/154497\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T09:54:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T09:54:13","slug":"folklore-mythology-and-tradition-five-must-see-shows-at-london-gallery-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/154497\/","title":{"rendered":"Folklore, mythology and tradition: five must-see shows at London Gallery Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflecting a broader revival of interest in folklore<\/a>, mythology and traditional processes and rituals, several exhibitions at London Gallery Weekend this year show artists looking back, not forward, for inspiration\u2014a refreshing antidote to our AI-dominated world.<\/p>\n

Some artists are indigenous to a particular culture\u2014the aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, for instance\u2014while some are borrowers, such as New Zealand-born Francis Upritchard, a self-confessed \u201cmagpie\u201d who collects influences from ancient mythology to science fiction.<\/p>\n

Here are five shows of female artists that bring tales and traditions from Argentina to Australia to South Korea to the streets of London.<\/p>\n

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Anna Perach’s Uncanny Valley (2025), made from Axminster yarn and artificial leather<\/p>\n

Copyright The Artist<\/p>\n

Anna Perach:\u00a0A leap of sympathyRichard Saltoun, 41 Dover St, W1S 4NS, until 24 June<\/p>\n

Born in Ukraine but now based in London, Anna Perach<\/a> takes her exhibition theme from the work of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who said that we must take a \u201cleap of sympathy [faith]\u201d in order to empathise with and relate to others. Perach\u2019s tufted, wearable sculptures, drawings and glass sculptures, set out across Saltoun\u2019s three Mayfair spaces, explore how ancient folklore and storytelling can influence our personal narratives and sense of self, and society\u2019s idea of identity and gender.<\/p>\n

Perach\u2019s protagonists often play with the idea of the \u201cmonstrous\u201d body\u2014witches and the like\u2014and one body of work central to this exhibition is The Uncanny Valley, a creepy procession of 12 tufted heads leading visitors through the gallery. Some feature multiple or oversized eyes, some none, playing with the idea of gaze and identity. The work takes its inspiration from the Russian folktale Vasilisa the Beautiful, in which a series of heads surround the witch Baba Yaga\u2019s house in the forest. <\/p>\n

A leap of sympathy will travel to East Gallery in Norwich in September 2025.<\/p>\n

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Francis Upritchard’s Any Noise Annoys an Oyster (2024), in balata rubber and bronze<\/p>\n

Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London<\/p>\n

Francis Upritchard: Sing Siren Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol Street, E2 7HR, 6 June-12 July<\/p>\n

Francis Upritchard\u2019s uncanny, darkly playful sculptures draw on all manner of inspiration\u2014ancient art, folklore, the natural world and science fiction. \u201cI\u2019m magpieing,\u201d she once told The Art Newspaper<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m always mixing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Zealand-born artist\u2019s new show with Kate McGarry includes figurative sculptures in rubber, bronze, ceramic, textiles, stone and glass, alongside works on paper, made initially for her recent exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, appealingly titled Any Noise Annoys an Oyster. Her works have a way of evoking everything and nothing in particular\u2014forms reminiscent of mythological animals, dinosaurs, and ancient creatures. \u201cI try and embrace how incorrect memory can be,\u201d Upritchard says in a statement. \u201cI\u2019m working the material in reference to human bodies, but remembered human bodies. For me it\u2019s quite important, the incorrect and the not looking just right or just so.\u201d <\/p>\n

Mythological inspiration is strong in these new works\u2014such as Medusa, with eels not snakes for hair, and\u00a0Sing Siren, references the mythical women who would lure sailors with their song\u2014as are Classical references, in the forms of ceramic vessels decorated with scenes from Greek mythology.<\/p>\n

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Soyoung Hyun, Shadow (2024)<\/p>\n

Courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

Soyoung Hyun:\u00a0Invitation to a RitualIMT Gallery, Unit 2, 210 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9NQ UK, until 29 June<\/p>\n

This, the first UK solo show for Paris-based Soyoung Hyun, includes two bodies of related work by the South Korean artist: her Purification box and Shadow series. Both bodies of work deal with memory and the blurred line between presence and absence, drawing on personal and cultural rituals as well as Japanese ceremonial vessels and Beninese ceramics.<\/p>\n

The Purification box series consists of clay vessels decorated with volcanic stones from Mount Etna, serving as memory boxes, to hold and externalise past traumas, obsessions and habits. The Shadow series, meanwhile, takes its inspiration from Korean folklore, in which shadows are seen as evidence of life. Hyun uses clay to sculpt the shadows of vases and flowers into solid form, giving permanence and weight to something ephemeral and intangible.<\/p>\n

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Installation view, Claudia Alarc\u00f3n & Sil\u00e4t: Choreography of the Imagination at Cecilia Brunson Projects<\/p>\n

Photography by Lucy Dawkins, courtesy of Cecilia Brunson Projects<\/p>\n

Claudia Alarc\u00f3n & Sil\u00e4t:\u00a0Choreography of the Imagination Cecilia Brunson Projects, 3G Royal Oak Yard, Bermondsey St, SE1 3GE, until 25 July<\/p>\n

Cecilia Brunson, originally from Chile, champions the work of South American artists in a very personal way, from a gallery attached to her family home in Bermondsey. For London Gallery Weekend, Brunson is showing the work of Claudia Alarc\u00f3n, an indigenous textile artist from the Wich\u00ed community of northern Salta in Argentina. The artist is also part of the Sil\u00e4t collective, led by Alarc\u00f3n and made up of of 100 multi-generational women weavers from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wich\u00ed communities. <\/p>\n

Their textiles, perhaps familiar to you from their inclusion in last year\u2019s Venice Biennale, are woven from fibres of the native chaguar plant, a material and practice integral to Wich\u00ed culture\u2014the weavings are thought to communicate unspoken thoughts and the messages of dreams and the subconscious. Their geometric designs are part of a part of a strong tradition in South America, and the gallery points out that Anni Albers collected chaguar textiles from Salta, using their design and weaving method as inspiration for her own work.<\/p>\n

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Emily Kam Kngwarray, Alhalker (I), 1992
\u00a9 Emily Kam Kngwarray\/Copyright Agency<\/p>\n

Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country5 Hanover Square, W1S 1HQ, 6 June-8 August<\/p>\n

Now recognised as a giant of Australian painting, Emily Kam Kngwarray<\/a> (around 1914\u20131996) will receive her first solo show at London\u2019s Tate Modern this July. To coincide, Pace will open an exhibition of the Aboriginal artist\u2019s work at its London gallery, in collaboration with the Melbourne-based gallery D\u2019Lan Contemporary. <\/p>\n

Kngwarray was an Elder of the Anmatyerr people of Australia\u2019s Northern Territory and custodian of Alhalker, her ancestral country, which runs deep through all of her work. Her paintings also embody the idea of the Dreaming, a foundational concept of Aboriginal culture which encompasses their spiritual beliefs, lived worldview and creation stories.<\/p>\n

Although Kngwarray only began painting seriously in 1988 when she was in her 70s, she produced an enormous body of around 3,000 works in the eight years before she died. The group of works on show at Pace chart her development from early organic forms to the minimalism of her last works. It will also include contemporary batik works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists inspired by Kngwarray.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The Art Newspaper is a media partner of London Gallery Weekend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reflecting a broader revival of interest in folklore, mythology and traditional processes and rituals, several exhibitions at London…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[9929,748,393,4845,4884,257,62052,62053,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-154497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-art-market","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-exhibitions","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-london-gallery-weekend","15":"tag-london-gallery-weekend-2025","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114618831043940634","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}