The Tamesis
While we’re talking photography, the National Portrait Gallery presents the UK’s first major exhibition to date of work by the master of modern photography, Catherine Opie (5 March to 31 May). The exhibition includes her seminal Holbeinian portraits of queer friends and contemporaries, as well as images that are in dialogue with the gallery’s permanent collection.
This season’s series of landmark solo exhibitions by female artists continues at the Barbican Centre. There, you’ll find a monumental exhibition of paintings and installations by the late Colombian artist Beatriz González, whose reflections on the role of disseminated images and media culture in the spread of violence have an eerie resonance in the context of current headlines.
In Bloomsbury, Prem Sahib’s installation at Perimeter’s new venue (until April 1) – a former pub next to its main space – provokes reflection on the queer subtext of common material associations. Near Ibraaz you’ll find Joe Namy’s “Cosmic Breath” (until August 30), a sound installation composed of Islamic recordings Adhanor a call to prayer, is arranged in the central space of the exciting new institution.
Head east to explore exciting exhibitions at progressive institutions like the Whitechapel Gallery, whose programming ranges from exhibitions of Veronica Ryan’s rich, textured vocabulary to rare photographs and recordings of Senga Nengudi’s radical, sculpture-focused performances in the 1970s (April 1-June 14). Chisenhale Gallery presents Racheal Crowther’s first UK institutional solo exhibition (17 April – 14 June), which centers on an installation of repurposed technical installations that explores how scent is (or can be) used as a tool of influence and social control, and more broadly, the capacity of perfume as a sculptural material.
At the nearby Cell Project Space, artist and musician LA Timpa is contemplating the traces sound leaves on matter (until May 3), while at Bow’s Nunnery Gallery you’ll find a poignant installation by the young British-Bengali artist Laisul Hoque, who recreated the bedroom he owned while caring for his father’s ill health in Bangladesh.
gallery
One of the Mayfair highlights is Hauser & Wirth’s presentation (on view until April 18) of the late Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s cleverly eccentric caged ecologies, many of which reflect humanity’s inevitable surrender to technology. Zwirner’s show is more serious, taking the form of multimedia works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Robert Ryman and Fred Sandback, pioneers of American Minimalism in the 1960s and 1970s (March 24-May 22). On Cork Street, Lehmann Maupin opens its Frieze store to host an exhibition of Freya Douglas-Morris’s magnificent landscapes (until March 28).
