Transavanguardia, seeds and stone: spring 2025 at Cork Street Galleries

Cork Street Galleries is pleased to announce its programme for the spring 2025 season. The street’s permanent roster of galleries – including Frieze No.9 Cork Street, Alison Jacques, Alon Zakaim Fine Art, Goodman Gallery, Holtermann Fine Art, MASSIMODECARLO, Messums London, Nahmad Projects, The Redfern Gallery, Stephen Friedman, Tiwani Contemporary and Waddington Custot – together present fifteen exciting exhibitions for the coming months.

Billie Zangewa, Splendour in the Plants, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

FRIEZE NO.9 CORK STREET (9 Cork Street) presents three exciting spring exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street, the art organisation’s Mayfair gallery space.

Lehmann Maupin: ‘Beyond Material’ (21 March – 10 May 2025)

March will see Lehmann Maupin present ‘Beyond Material’, a group show curated by the gallery’s London-based partner Isabella Icoz. Beyond Material brings together work from nine artists within the gallery’s program, including Kader Attia, McArthur Binion, Todd Gray, Nicholas Hlobo, Shirazeh Houshiary, Liza Lou, Kim Yun Shin, Do Ho Suh, and Billie Zangewa. The exhibition is centred around the unique approach each of these artists take to material within their practices – from Houshiary’s use of water and aquacryl to create fluid, ethereal forms, to Lou’s decades-long engagement with glass beads as a primary sculptural medium, to Zangewa’s hand-stitched silk collages, which she imbues with a sense of warm domesticity.

Lucia Pizzani, Inwards, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

Apsara Studio x Frieze Studios: Lucia Pizzani – ‘Clay, seeds and other ancestors’ (21 March – 5 April 2025)

‘Clay, seeds and other ancestors’, presents Lucia Pizzani’s expressive practice that explores migration, language and materiality through the voices of plants and ancient practices. Through her use of clay and seeds, across sculpture, works on paper, performance and video, Pizzani weaves together narratives and contemplations from different temporalities around human and botanical legacies. Seeking to preserve stories of migration, from cultural traditions to the movement of plants and its implications, Pizzani speaks to her own journey from Venezuela to London, and evokes the layers and stories of an increasingly hybrid, complex and global world.

Dima Rebus, Untitled, 2024. Courtesy of the artist

Artwin Gallery: Dima Rebus – ‘Floaters’ (21 March – 6 April 2025)

‘Floaters’, an exhibition by Dima Rebus (b.1988, Naberezhnye Chelny, Russia) presents a new series of paintings at Frieze, No.9 Cork Street in collaboration with Artwin Gallery. The exhibition’s title, ‘Floaters’, refers to the anonymous swimmers that are the subject of Rebus’ expansive water colours whilst also considering the ophthalmological meaning of the word: barely perceptible spots, threads or cobwebs which can bob before our eyes. These floaters are caused by tiny proteins and cell structures within the eye, the shadows of which are cast onto the retina. Eye floaters are particularly noticeable when staring at a monochromatic expanse such as a large body of water.

Maeve Gilmore, Child with model bird, c.1950s. Courtesy Alison Jacques © Maeve Gilmore Estate; photo: Ben Westoby

ALISON JACQUES (22 Cork Street) presents a solo exhibition of Maeve Gilmore’s work. Gilmore’s carefully constructed interior world, replete with Surrealist imagery and centred on portraits of family, situates domestic scenes centre-stage. ‘I always seem to have been able to paint when there is intense life surrounding me,’ Gilmore wrote in 1968. Her paintings ‘made alone and imperatively,’ reflect a romantic life, punctuated by war and illness, and equally as devoted to art-making as it was to home-making. As women’s roles in the Surrealist movement and beyond have been the subject of renewed interest, Gilmore’s work has been compared to that of Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar, Itlhell Colquhoun and Vanessa Bell.

The exhibition runs from 21 March – 3 May 2025.

ALON ZAKAIM FINE ART (27 Cork Street) presents ‘The Characters and Places in the Art of Eric Tucker’. The show examines the relationship between the people and places in Tucker’s art and their real-life counterparts, using Google Maps, a new book, and a selection of preparatory drawings displayed alongside his oils and watercolours to provide fresh insights into his visual storytelling. The exhibition will further cement Tucker’s place in Modern British art – an artist who, after a lifetime of quiet observation, now speaks through his paintings to an ever-growing audience.

The exhibition runs from 1 May – 30 May 2025.

David Goldblatt, Winder house, Farrar Shaft, Anglo Mines, Germiston. 1965, 1965. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery

GOODMAN GALLERY (26 Cork Street) is delighted to present ‘Trace, Tremor, Remnant’ – an exhibition that brings the practices of David Goldblatt and Clive van den Berg into dialogue, offering a layered reflection on the histories embedded within South Africa’s landscapes. Through different yet complementary approaches, Goldblatt’s photographs and van den Berg’s paintings explore the ways in which land functions as a repository of memory, power, and unresolved narratives. The exhibition presents two series of Goldblatt’s photographs – one taken during apartheid and the other after its end – alongside paintings by Van den Berg’s created in 2024 and 2025. Their artworks show how space and place are loaded sites carrying the marks of personal and collective histories, revealing how the past persists in the present.

The exhibition runs from 27 March – 3 May 2025.

Lu Song, The Room Upstairs, 2017, Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Holtermann Fine Art

HOLTERMANN FINE ART (30 Cork Street) presents Tony Cragg, Lu Song, Jesse Wine, on view until 12 April 2025. Tony Cragg (b. 1949, United Kingdom) has been working and exhibiting since 1969. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London and has lived in Wuppertal since 1977. Lu Song (b. 1982, China) is an artist based in Beijing. Graduating in 2006 from the Wimbledon College of Art London, he has exhibited all over the world with solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Berlin, Sidney, Beijing. Jesse Wine (b. 1983, UK) is currently based in New York, USA. He gained his BA from Camberwell College of Art, London and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London.

The exhibition runs until 12 April 2025.

Mimmo Paladino, Sei Santi di Venti n° 1, 2018, Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and MASSIMODECARLO

MASSIMODECARLO (16 Clifford Street) is delighted to present ‘Mimmo Paladino’, marking the artist’s long-awaited return to the UK after nearly two decades. A pioneering figure of the Transavanguardia movement, Paladino has built a distinctive visual language – one that fuses mythology, history, and experimentation across painting, sculpture, and beyond.

Deeply rooted in Italian culture, his work carries an ancient, almost mystical sensibility, where echoes of Etruscan, Egyptian, and early Christian iconography blend with contemporary expression. Moving fluidly across mediums – from large-scale installations to film and set design – Paladino crafts a universe where symbols recur: faces, hands, enigmatic figures, all suspended between presence and absence, like fragments of a lost language. Balancing figuration and abstraction, his compositions draw from folklore, ritual, and what he calls an “archaeology of memory.” Cryptic motifs emerge like relics, pulsing with quiet intensity. Yet for Paladino, tradition is never about nostalgia – it’s material to be fractured, reimagined, and made new.

The exhibition runs from 29 April – 28 May 2025.

Elisabeth Frink, Soldier’s Head IV, 1965. Bronze, Edition 4 of 6. Courtesy of Messums London

MESSUMS LONDON (28 Cork Street) present ‘Facing Fear’, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings from across Elisabeth Frink’s remarkable career. The exhibition will include Soldier’s Head IV (1965), which was shown in the 1985 RA exhibition, and Small Warrior (1956) recently re-discovered and not shown in London since its attribution on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme in 2023.

2025 marks 40 years since Elisabeth Frink opened her first major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London – incidentally the first solo exhibition of a female artist in the institution’s history. In fact, in the same year, she rejected the offer to become the first female president of the RA, preferring to be thought of simply as an artist, rather than a public figure. To mark the anniversary of this landmark in British art history, Messums are presenting for sale Soldier’s Head IV (1965), which was shown in the 1985 RA exhibition, alongside a series of exceptional works from within the same timeframe as that of the RA exhibition (1952-1984).

The exhibition runs from 18 March – 12 April 2025.

Painting in the round, Gris; Magritte; Picasso. Courtesy of Nahmad Projects

NAHMAD PROJECTS (2 Cork Street) is pleased to present ‘Painting in the Round’, an exhibition which challenges how we perceive and engage with paintings, inviting viewers to explore both the front and back of each artwork. Traditionally, paintings are seen as singular images, framed and presented to reveal only their intended subject. This exhibition, however, unveils the unseen—the physical and historical traces on the reverse of the canvas that offer deeper insight into an artwork’s journey.

Featuring a diverse selection of works spanning different periods and styles, ‘Painting in the Round’ sheds light on the hidden lives of paintings. The backs of these works – often covered in annotations, labels, signatures and other inscriptions – tell stories of ownership and artistic process. Some reveal sketches or unfinished compositions, while others bear the marks of time and movement through collectors’ hands and museum storerooms.

Painting in the Round features works by Alberto Burri, Georges Braque, Lucio Fontana, Juan Gris, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi, Joan Miró, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Alexis Ralaivao, and Francesco Vezzoli.

The exhibition runs until 17 April 2025.

Installation: Anne Rothenstein, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2025). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photos by Mark Blower

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY (5-6 Cork Street) is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Anne Rothenstein, following her solo presentation in New York last spring. Comprising portraits, landscapes and interiors, these enigmatic paintings are frequently characterised by a dreamlike quality. Speaking of her process, Rothenstein says, “My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting, and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive.”

The exhibition runs from 14 March – 12 April 2025.

David Inshaw, Love and Death, 1999, Oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm. Courtesy of The Redfern Gallery

THE REDFERN GALLERY (20 Cork Street) presents ‘David Inshaw: Thinking the Landscape’ – Paintings, Drawings and Prints from the 1970s to the present day.

This survey exhibition presents some of the best of Inshaw’s work, focusing on the terrain that has been his chief inspiration for more than 50 years. When he first settled in Devizes in 1971, he took as his main subject the ancient landscape of Wiltshire surrounding the town. He has walked the Marlborough Downs and witnessed there the varying lights of dawn, dusk or midday, charged with the emotional undertow of the particular moment. Every painting he makes of this landscape is imbued with memories which serve to make it an intensely felt image, though its autobiographical nature need never be known to the viewer. In this connection, Inshaw likes to quote Thomas Hardy’s phrase ‘the beauty of associations is far superior to the beauty of aspect.’ Inshaw paints the beauty of aspect, but he brings to it an enriching beauty of association. This exhibition, and the accompanying catalogue with a new essay by Dr Andrew Lambirth, the leading authority on Inshaw’s work, firmly underlines the centrality of David Inshaw’s place in the great tradition of Romantic landscape painting in this country.

The exhibition runs from 26 March – 25 April 2025.

The black of space comma space comma space as told by herself, 2024, Thread, Ink, Gesso, Acrylic, Oil on Tracing paper. Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary. Photography by Deniz Guzel

TIWANI CONTEMPORARY (24 Cork Street) is pleased to present an upcoming exhibition of Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s work, ‘space comma space comma space’. The exhibition embraces not-knowing, the breaking of habits, irreverence and the use of mistakes as integral components of the creative process. Through works on paper, the artist creates a memoir of her time inside the studio – through acts of stitching, cutting, tearing and tracing. The drawings, paintings, and collages are in conversation through shared marks and methods, as well as through titles which suggest a more literal dialogue between the works themselves.

With this new body, Ogunji uses magazine pages, gessoed tissue paper, and glassine, as well as the architectural tracing paper for which she is known. Many of the works have an almost-hyperbolic density to them – especially when considered alongside her past oeuvre where stitched figures are commonly surrounded by large expanses of paper-space. There is an irreverence for the correct way materials should be used: oil paint on tracing paper, a two-sided painting (where only one side is visible, but both are important), or the combination of oil and ink forming a resist pattern of dots along the surface of the trace.

The exhibition runs from 3 April – 24 May 2025.

Yves Dana: Citadelle Installation View. Image Courtesy of Waddington Custot

WADDINGTON CUSTOT (11-12 Cork Street) presents ‘Yves Dana: Citadelle’ (until 10 April 2025). For his first solo presentation at Waddington Custot, the sculptor presents unique works created over the past decade, including a number of new and unseen stone sculptures, as well as abstract wall-based reliefs in stone, wood and iron which extend his sculptural language. Waddington Custot announced representation of Yves Dana in autumn 2024.

Subsequently, the gallery will present ‘Shape of Colour’ (22 April – 29 May 2025), a group exhibition comprising of works by David Annesley, Paul Feeley, Sheila Hicks, William Turnbull, Fabienne Verdier, and more.