London Gallery Weekend 2025 at Cork Street Galleries

London Gallery Weekend, the world’s largest event of its kind and unique among global gallery weekend events in the breadth and diversity of its participating galleries, arrives to the beat of meteorological summer. City-wide over 6 – 8 June 2025, art makes its case for the flâneur, uniting to propose a series of routes and the stringing together of shows as you like, encouraged by extended opening hours. Cork Street, the spiritual home of modern and contemporary art offers a handful of anticipated openings, curator-led walkthroughs and the reminder to visit several shows now – or never.

FRIEZE NO.9 CORK STREET (9 Cork Street) offers three stirring exhibitions running concurrently at No.9 Cork Street, the art organisation’s Mayfair gallery space.

Vadehra Art Gallery: Biraaj Dodiya and Gieve Patel – ‘Due to an obscure reason’ (23 May – 8 June 2025)

New Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery is presenting a two-person exhibition by artists from its city: Biraaj Dodiya and Gieve Patel (1940-2023). It’s curated by the London-based Linsey Young, also responsible for the recent acclaimed Tate Britain exhibition ‘Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK 1970-1990’. In this show, Dodiya presents a collection of paintings and vessel-like sculptures that reference the body and its encounters, while Patel’s paintings explore the psycho-social complexities of the individual and communities.

Jhaveri Contemporary: Muhanned Cader, Lubna Chowdhary, and Seher Shah – ‘Horizons’ (23 May – 8 June 2025)

Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary returns to No.9 Cork Street with ‘Horizons’, a group exhibition featuring Muhanned Cader, Lubna Chowdhary and Seher Shah, who explore variations of line, landscape and the built environment. Despite their different approaches, the three artists share a commitment to making, relying on an engagement with materials and process, and treating the idea of the horizon metaphorically, as a boundary and threshold of knowledge, as well as notions of connection and interdependence.

Rashid Rana – ‘Fractured Moment’ (23 May – 8 June 2025)

Rashid Rana presents a solo exhibition encompassing a bold collection of new works that mobilise the power of an image as both witness and architect, visually encapsulating the artist’s prolonged enquiry into time, space, wholeness and fragmentation. These works are monumental counterparts, engaging with formalism, documentation and abstraction – from grainy warzone surveillance to the overlapping inventories inside warehouses.

Join No.9 Cork Street on a walkthrough of the three exhibitions from 11:00 on Saturday 7 June, led by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate.

ALISON JACQUES (22 Cork Street) presents ‘Sites’, a solo exhibition of work by Scottish artist Carol Rhodes (b.1959; d.2018). Spanning nearly 20 years, many of the works have never been seen in London before. In 1994, Rhodes began a body of highly distinctive paintings, which she proceeded to develop over two decades, until motor neurone disease made it finally impossible for her to paint and draw. Since her death in 2018, the significance of these works has been increasingly recognised. Drawing on recent research in her archive, this exhibition sets up specific pairings of paintings and drawings dating from 1995 to 2014 to illustrate the richness, specificity and psychological depth of her practice. This exhibition runs parallel to Rhodes participating in ‘A Living Collection’, The Hepworth Wakefield and ‘Fake Barn Country’, Raven Row, London.

Rhodes’s paintings are aerial views of fictional, post-industrial edge-lands; land interrupted by excavations, depots, industrial units, motorways and business parks, and sometimes bordered by the sea. Rhodes described her subject matter as being ‘in-between places’ and ‘non-places’ – places without history that were normally disregarded or hidden. The aerial viewpoint she employed was not, however, merely a formal device; it had very personal resonances. Being remote was not just to do with distance, it was a state of mind: “The thing about being up high is that you can see a lot. And the higher up you go, the more you can see. The more terrain that is opened up for us to see, the easier it is to understand what happens below and so it gives us a feeling of security and control. But if you go too high, there is a line that, when crossed, changes that into an agoraphobic panic. I would like my pictures to be on that line…the line between security and unease.”

Rhodes felt that to look down was to see something that was ‘already over’. It induced what she described as a sort of nostalgia she connected to her peripatetic
upbringing. Growing up in India, she moved to England when she was fourteen, and soon afterwards to Scotland, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. A lasting sense of displacement and estrangement fed into her work in a very deep way.

The exhibition previews on 6 June from 18:00 – 20:00 and runs from 7 June – 9 August 2025.

Additionally, Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition of work by Italian artist Bona de Mandiargues (b.1926, Rome; d.2000, Paris), curated by Simon Grant. In recent years, de Mandiargues has been the subject of renewed curatorial interest and international recognition, following her first institutional retrospective at the Nivola Museum in Sardinia (2022). In 2024, her work was included in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Surréalisme at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

This exhibition, the first solo show of de Mandiargues in the UK, showcases paintings and mixed media assemblages as well as colour pencil and gouache works on paper. De Mandiargues’s highly charged and surreal compositions reflect her intuitive, visceral, instinctive and often autobiographical approach. She created a powerful repertoire of work filled with figures of ambiguous sexual identity, fantastical creatures and images laden with symbols, mythology, metamorphosis and dreams.

The exhibition runs until 4 July 2025.

FLOWERS GALLERY (21 Cork Street) presents ‘In Flux’, a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist Liza Giles. The exhibition title reflects Giles’ process-driven approach, where the act of creation is continuously evolving and in constant transformation. Throughout her practice, Giles explores the tension between fluidity and control, presence and absence, capturing the dynamic, ever-changing nature of her work as it unfolds. This sense of flux permeates each piece, allowing the works to emerge organically, shifting and adapting as they progress.

For the first time, Giles introduces six-panel works that are flipped and switched both vertically and horizontally, allowing her to expand the physical and visual complexity of her compositions. As with earlier works, the paintings are built on unprimed canvas, laid flat to maintain control over form and surface. Each piece features a contrast of hard-line edges and painterly raw edges, reflecting a tension between precision and gesture that runs throughout the exhibition.

Giles works with a limited colour palette inspired by the natural landscape, earthy siennas and umbers, grass greens and sky blues, grounded by large areas of her signature ultra-matt black, a pigment that absorbs 99% of light and creates a velvet-like depth. These colours move across the surface with a quiet rhythm, creating a strong sense of push and pull between the positive and negative spaces.

The exhibition runs from 5 June – 5 July 2025.

GOODMAN GALLERY (26 Cork Street) presents an exhibition by Leonardo Drew, featuring a striking new series of eight recently created wall sculptures and six new works on paper, collectively crafted from wood, glass and painted plaster. Running concurrently with Drew’s first institutional solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, this presentation further solidifies his presence in the city. Through his engagement with material, Drew continues his exploration of form, texture and spatial dialogue.

Renewal, decay, fragmentation and reconfiguration are central to Leonardo Drew’s practice. Using hand-weathered raw materials—washed, burnt, broken and reassembled—his works carry a history embedded in their form. Everyday and industrial objects retain traces of their original structure, revealing the tension between destruction and regeneration. Through nonlinear compositions, Drew embraces disorder and disintegration as part of a continuous cycle of interpretation. In his largely monochrome works, colour becomes physical rather than purely visual—another material shaped by time and process.

Through abstraction, Drew’s sculptures offer a vast repertoire of imagery. Works such as Number 440, Number 441, and Number 444 are dense and layered compositions that feature geometric formations — the repetition of squares that collectively form a larger square gives the works a structured, grid-like presence. Conceptually, the work alludes to entropy—not as a direct depiction of order and chaos, but as an undercurrent accentuating the fragility of form and the possibility of transformation. Crisscrossed ruins, tessellated fragments, and broken remnants recur throughout, reflecting an assemblage process that is both methodical and intuitive. Defined by open forms, asymmetry, and subtle gradations in colour, scale and texture, the works reveal a delicate balance between structure and unpredictability.

The exhibition runs until 28 June 2025.

HOLTERMANN FINE ART (30 Cork Street) presents ‘Balancing Acts’, an in-focus exhibition comprising two sculptures and one painting that showcases the work of three contemporary artists: Neil Gall (b. 1967), Michel Pérez Pollo (b. 1981) and Olivia Bax (b. 1988).

‘Balancing Acts’ is an invitation to consider the ways in which three different artists brilliantly juggle abstract form and colour to create bold, well-balanced imbalances that tap into our fascination with asymmetry and counterpose. Each work offers a portal into a way of seeing the world in which things might just about hang together, somehow or other, with one thing supportively placed against or awkwardly holding another in balance and perhaps in check.

Gall’s work is a cast jesmonite assemblage which combines three elements that each sit
carefully on top of the other in an almost contrapposto way. The title refers to the myth of Sisyphus, a man trapped within a futile labour that sees him endlessly pushing a boulder up a mountain. Gall’s precarious-looking, rock ‘n roll sculpture does not move, but it looks like it could.

Bax’s sculpture is made with her now characteristic blend of revealed and concealed metal armature and colour-imbued paper pulp. It shares the compositional tipsiness and ballsy top-heaviness as Gall’s sculpture, but is on wheels which gives the sculpture a potential mobility. The sculpture’s metal railings are also equipped with hooks that recall candy canes that invite us in and pull it in all directions.

Pérez Pollo paints paintings of clusters of brightly coloured modelled forms that each sit on top or beside one another, with a fascinating mix of poise and clumsiness. Here, we find four seemingly incongruous forms that have been wedged together between two walls, creating a mutually supportive arrangement in which one object holds up another. They look like temporary placements, but Pollo’s painting fixes them in oil on canvas, celebrating their sculptural team work and their special, idiosyncratic togetherness.

The exhibition runs from 6 June – 26 July 2025.

MASSIMODECARLO (16 Clifford Street) presents Yan Pei-Ming: ‘Wanted’. From the beginning of his career Pei-Ming has stood out for his interest in the human figure and portraiture. He gained international recognition for his expressive and monumental portraits of historical figures like Mao Zedong, the Buddha, the Pope, and Bruce Lee, while also exploring personal themes through self-portraits and depictions of his family.

The artist famously uses a long, mop-sized brush to create his iconic images, working rapidly with wet-into-wet oil paint, primarily on a two-toned monochrome colour palette in black and white or red and white.

Born in Shanghai in 1960; the artist lives and works between Dijon, Paris and Shanghai. Pei-Ming’s work was included in The Lyon Biennale (1997, 2000); Venice Biennale, Venice (1995, 2003); the Sevilla Biennale, Sevilla (2006); the Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2007); The Bangkok Biennale (2018), among others.

The exhibition runs from 4 June – 8 August 2025.

MESSUMS LONDON (28 Cork Street) presents a new exhibition of sculpture by Tom Waugh. Waugh’s practice is an exploration of materiality and trompe l’œil, centred around his ability to meticulously translate disposable objects into stone. The exhibition ‘Future Remains’ considers permanence and impermanence, geology, fossilisation, manufacture, pollution and waste in 11 new works from the artist’s studio, each painstakingly hand-carved from a variety of stones.

In Waugh’s hands, a block of limestone becomes a crushed polystyrene coffee cup; a traffic cone is hewn from three types of marble; and a gleaming white plastic fork, scaled to the size of a trident, protrudes like Excalibre from a lump of rock. His focus is the discarded, broken remains of mass-produced objects that would ordinarily be considered unworthy of close inspection; items which escape our scrutiny and blend unnoticed into our daily existence. Yet Waugh spends hours, days, weeks and months studying every crease, dent and surface texture in their form, recreating each idiosyncrasy of the original object with virtuosic skill. By carving these pieces – often on a monumental scale – in materials that have been almost exclusively allocated to the province of high art and ‘important’ subject matter since ancient times, he elevates their status to something worthy of close attention and, in doing so, highlights the throwaway culture of our society, and our disregard for these objects, which are in may ways remarkable, forcing the viewer to consider their own experience of these ubiquitous articles in their everyday lives.

Simultaneously, following a significant large-scale travelling exhibition in Japan and Taiwan in 2023 – 2024, Messums Org is pleased to present a new body of work from Makoto Kagoshima at Cork Street.

The Japanese exhibition – ‘Day after Day’ – was presented to Kagoshima as the idea of reflecting openly on his everyday life in the gallery space. This was presented as a variety of dishes featuring his customary animals and plants in rich colours on the “breakfast”, “lunch” and “dinner” table. An idea that gave Kagoshima the “great opportunity for me to reconsider the things I love, what I really want to do, or new things I want to try.”

Travelling from renowned institutions Itami City Museum of Art, History and Culture, PLAY! MUSEUM, Tokyo, Sano Art Museum, Shizuoka and the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Fukuo, in Japan to the Huashan1914 Creative Park, Taipei, Taiwan, this collection of work proves why time and time again Kagoshima garners international attention and adoration for his ceramics.

Both exhibitions run concurrently until 14 June 2025.

NAHMAD PROJECTS (2 Cork Street) presents ‘Visual Symphonies’, curated by musician and Grammy Award-winning artist Eve, who brings a performer’s finely tuned perspective to the exhibition. Music – intangible, deeply emotive, yet inherently structural – has long served as both inspiration and model for visual artists. From the Old Masters to the modern era, it has established itself as a universal language, conveyed through rhythm, harmony, tone and dissonance.

The exhibition explores the enduring relationship between two of the most powerful forms of expression: the visual and the auditory.

Focusing on the 20th century, ‘Visual Symphonies’ brings together key works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Juan Gris, Raoul Dufy, Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, and Georges Braque. Each piece reflects a distinct encounter between sound and image. Together the works create a free-flowing, polyphonic conversation, between the eye and the ear – surrounded by the very music that inspired these artists.

For the avant-garde, music offered an escape from narrative and figuration, opening new ways to express rhythm, mood and abstraction. The works presented reflect both literal and conceptual approaches of these ideas: Alexander Calder evokes the ‘sound of silence’ in suspended sculptural form, his mobiles become instruments played by the currents of air, stirring up a three-dimensional score. Wassily Kandinsky maps sound through synaesthesia, composing a visual symphony in colour and shape; Georges Braque, meanwhile, creates a Cubist perspective on instrument and player, echoing the contrapuntal, shifting nature of Bach’s musical compositions.

The exhibition runs from 6 June – 25 July 2025.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY (5-6 Cork Street) presents presents ‘Rooted in Memory’, the first UK solo exhibition of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation). A groundbreaking visual artist as well as a prominent curator and activist, Smith paved the way for contemporary Indigenous artists over her remarkable fifty-year career. Working across painting, drawing, print and sculpture, her practice blends abstraction and figuration, reinterpreting motifs from canonical American painting to reframe historical narratives and foreground the Native American experience.

The exhibition opens with a room devoted to the ‘Tierra Madre’ paintings, the last body of work which Smith completed in the months before her death in early 2025.
These works represent the culmination of her interest in Indigenous empowerment, land rights and environmental justice. Each canvas focuses on a central figure,
calling to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, but replacing the idealised Renaissance male with a female. The paintings pay homage to female icons known
for their political activism: ‘Tierra Madre: Wilma Mankiller’ (2024-25) celebrates the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, while ‘Tierra Madre: Annie Lennox’ (2024-25) honours the Scottish singer and human rights campaigner. The paintings are charged with symbolic power and demonstrate how tirelessly Smith used her practice as a form of advocacy, right through to this final body of work.

Offering a broad survey of works, the exhibition also presents a range of large-scale, historical paintings. In 1992, Smith began the ‘I See Red’ series as a critical response to the quincentennial celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the US, “to remind viewers that Native Americans are still alive”. Speaking of the ‘Trade Canoe’ series, Whitney Museum curator Laura Phipps remarks, “Smith’s painted canoe becomes a stage on which the violent and exploitative history of this country is performed, as she masterfully collages historic photographs, zoological illustrations, and clippings from newspapers and magazines”. The appropriated imagery and layers of collage are reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, demonstrating the artist’s ability to combine Indigenous iconography with modernist influences. Smith explains that she employs techniques such as Pop Art because it serves as “a common language” to communicate with a wider audience through familiar imagery “symbolic of American mainstream culture”.

Another room of the exhibition is dedicated to Smith’s drawing practice, including expressionistic works from the Petroglyph Park series (1985-87). Rendered in a vibrant colour palette, these drawings envision various cultural markers from the contested New Mexico landscape. The artist created these in response to plans for a suburban housing development, which threatened to destroy thousands of ancient sacred petroglyphs on the volcanic cliffs near her home west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This exhibition is at once a celebration of Smith’s legacy and a meditation on the stories and struggles which she championed. At a time of political uncertainty and escalating climate crisis, her work remains more vital than ever.

The exhibition opens on 6 June from 10:00 – 20:00 and runs until 26 July 2025.

THE REDFERN GALLERY (20 Cork Street) presents Keith Grant: ‘The Last Ice’. Since the 1950s Grant has travelled repeatedly to Norway (where he now lives), to Iceland, Greenland, the Tropics, and twice to Antarctica. Sir David Attenborough praised Grant’s ‘ability to convey the awesome mystery of nature at its most monumental and dramatic’, describing him as ‘one of the few painters whose artistic horizons have also expanded’.

For those familiar with Grant’s work, there is a perceptible difference to ‘The Last Ice’, executed over a quietly focused period during the last fifteen months. It is as if he has, at last, been allowed to draw breath and exhale. These paintings, among the finest he has produced, are a deeply considered, impassioned homage to the North.

The exhibition runs from 4 June – 4 July 2025.

TIWANI CONTEMPORARY (24 Cork Street) presents Virginia Chihota: ‘Munoonei kana makaditarisa nhai Mwari?/What do you see when you look at me ohh God?’

Chihota inimitably visualises her inner world as an emotionally shifting, symbolic terrain – a reconnaissance marked by vigilance, self-questioning, and transformative resolution. These new works originate from a question that unexpectedly came to her, “what do you see when you look at me?”.

The recurring motif of a seat, specifically a stool, becomes the pedestal for the represented body (her own) in direct observation and conversation with the Divine. A series of gesturally restless, and physiologically awkward standing or seated positions figure clearly in Chihota’s visual ruminations, acknowledging the reality of what’s experienced as opposed to the reality of what might be seen by others.

The first In Focus introduction this year in the viewing room, features, Felix Shumba: ‘For want of a horse, a button was lost’. Shumba has created an installation of charcoal drawings influenced by the evidential and documentary values of photography, particularly referencing 19th century daguerreotype plates and the work of American photojournalist J. Ross Bauman’s 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning sequence of photographs following the Grey’s Scouts, a Rhodesian mounted infantry and their brutal treatment of suspected guerrillas as part of inland security activity. Featuring a dystopian fiction that imagines a time-traveling military corps, the Salt Corps agents, activating a revisitation and surveyance of British colonial-era Rhodesia, now the Republic of Zimbabwe, Shumba explores the settler-colonial perspective and proprietary pursuit to discover, conquer and extract from a landscape and people that remain deeply scarred by trauma.

The exhibitions preview with a drinks reception on 6 June from 18:00 – 20:00 and run concurrently from 7 June – 20 September 2025.

Enjoy a curator-led walkthrough in conversation with Adelaide Bannerman and Virginia Chihota, from 15:00 – 15:30 on Saturday 7 June 2025, to be followed by refreshments and conversation.

WADDINGTON CUSTOT (11-12 Cork Street) presents ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’, a solo exhibition of 12 new generative artworks by celebrated French conceptual artist Bernar Venet (b.1941, Château-Arnoux, France).

Marking a major milestone in Venet’s six-decade-long practice, this exhibition introduces his first use of artificial intelligence in art making. Though new in process, these pieces extend Venet’s continued investigation into systems of disorder, entropy and authorship. ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’ will be the first presentation of Venet’s ‘Generative Angles Paintings’ in the UK, and will coincide with London Gallery Weekend.

Bernar Venet is an artist internationally recognised for his conceptual approach. A major figure in the 1960s New York avant-garde, with works in the collection of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, and the Centre Pompidou, amongst many more, the artist has long used the conceptual languages of mathematics, science and philosophy to interrogate the boundaries of art. Later making monumental sculptures in steel, he is also known for performative acts in which steel motifs – lines, arcs, and angles – are toppled and left where they fall: a spontaneous outcome within controlled parameters.

Rather than a departure, Venet’s turn to generative art is a natural evolution of this spontaneous practice. While generative art today is often linked to recent advances in digital technology and algorithms, its underlying principles – chance, entropy, and systematic variation – have been central to Venet’s practice since the 1960s, seen in the sculptural ‘Pile of Coal’ (1963), to his Déchet and Goudron paintings (1961–1963), to his ‘Performance in Garbage’ (1961).

These new works, the ‘Generative Angles Paintings’, originate from digital images created in collaboration with a team of coders. The artist uses algorithms to generate variations of the recurring motif of the angle: a central form in his practice since the 1970s. For Venet, angles – two lines sharing a single point – represent a rare form of visual purity. Unlike abstract or figurative imagery, which may carry multiple interpretations, angles belong to the language of mathematics: they are monosemic, or, singular in meaning. The digital compositions are then printed onto canvases that have been hand-painted by Venet.

The exhibition marks Venet’s second solo show at Waddington Custot, following his 2022 exhibition ‘Hypotheses’, which also focused on his Angles series. ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’ continues this radical inquiry at a moment of growing debate around ethics, creativity and authorship that come with these new forms of technology.

The exhibition runs from 6 June – 19 July 2025.