Five art things, About time, what happened to the last few weeks? Well we did address this with the previous five and broken eyes are mending now and could this be the last of the false starts? Broken eyes curtailing art adventures, we’re still itching to really properly get going and didn’t we say all this last time? Well besides the broken eyes thing, yes we did, but hey, did, afte almost a month of having to sit in a dark corner, did get out to the rather rewarding Sam Windett show at the Approach yesterday. On we go then and never mind whatever we said last time, that was then, this, once again is about this week and next and needing more cake and yes you are right, at the end of last year we were asking if London’s art scene gone a little flat? Are the newer galleries a little too full of themselves and believing their own hype? Is it all just a little too conservative? Dare we say politely boring? We did go to lots of shows in the early part of the year most of which we elected not to cover, the policy around here is still only to cover things when we feel really (or mostly) positive about those things and most of the shows in the early part of the year haven’t really been worth bothering with, mosty we’ve been politely interested and we could have maybe written an uncomitted review or two but we didn’t… We will be fully back very very soon.

Here, for what any of this is worth is our first five art things for quite a few weeks. Five more art things? Five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now (or any moment now). Five art shows to check out in the coming days. We do aim to make this an (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events, five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This Five Things thing is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will…

And we should add, that entry to these recommended exhibitions and events, unless otherwise stated, is free.

1: Iris Schomaker, Watching the Perseids at Huxley-Parlour Gallery (Maddox Street) – Open now and until 25th May 2024 – Rather looking forward to seeing this one, Huxley-Parlour say they are “delighted to announce a new solo exhibition of work by German artist Iris Schomaker, her second with the gallery”.

“Watching the Perseids presents new small-scale works on panel and paper, made over the past year, which continue Schomaker’s exploration of the generative tension between figuration and abstraction.

The figurative works in Watching the Perseids are anonymous and androgynous; figures with faded out faces, economically expressed using angular geometric forms and rendered in Schomaker’s distinctive, monochromatic palette. Schomaker’s process of simplifying the human form is one of simultaneous reduction and expansion, conveying only the essential figurative information in a manner that positions her subjects as mutable and universal beings. The enigmatic quality of Schomaker’s figures reflects how she develops her subject matter; never working from a single image, she instead locates her subjects within a complex nexus of imagery – photographs, drawings, music, text – amassed as both a physical archive and transitory memories. This new body of work is, unusually for Schomaker, populated by pairs of figures. Two people commune around a chess board, yet the artist still imbues the works with a sense of solitude. Schomaker’s figures remain caught up in their own internal logics, which is heightened in her depictions of a horse and its rider. The animal is not necessarily real, but a synergetic energy that strengthens and grounds the figure.

Schomaker’s figures lack a fixed visual reference point and only emerge in the process of painting, being better understood as phantasmagorical assemblages of infinite fragments than individual beings. She refers to the people within her work as ‘icons’ – maintaining a symbolic value that situates them outside of a singular reality. These subjects shift in and out of focus, often foregrounded by the artist’s mark-making process. Passages of dense, dark oil paint are partially layered over skeletal charcoal underdrawing, with defined boundaries between flatness and depth revealing Schomaker’s complex working methods.

If Schomaker’s subjects find their form through the process of painting, they only become known through the process of looking. Each viewer is invited to commune with her figures and locate a personal narrative within their quasi-abstracted forms. The exhibition’s title, referring to the Perseid meteor shower, relates to Schomaker’s notion that abstraction offers a unique potential for creative encounters between viewer and image. The natural phenomenon of the Perseids represents a moment outside of our quotidian experiences of time and place, which is at once intelligible but inaccessible and inconceivable. For Schomaker, this confrontation with something greater than ourselves mirrors what she pertains to in her own practice, which attempts to visualise experiences connected to, but ultimately beyond, our own reality.

The exhibition also includes a series of landscapes on panel, rendered in inky blacks and dark greens, Schomaker seeks to evoke the uncanny, other-worldly atmosphere at the transition from the diurnal to the nocturnal. Sitting alongside Schomaker’s figurative scenes they work to resolutely assert the connectivity between human, animal and environment – with all subject matter treated with equal reverence.

Schomaker, born 1973, studied at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel, before continuing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen and Trondheim. Schomaker has participated in several national exhibitions, including at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, in 2007 and 2010, and at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt in 2013. The following year she participated at the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland. She previously exhibited with Huxley-Parlour in 2021, with her solo presentation in secret kept/ in silence sealed. Schomaker’s work is now held in numerous public and private collections, including the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Germany and Deutsche Bank collections. She lives and works in Berlin.”

Huxley-Parlour Gallery (Maddox Street) is at 45 Maddox Street, London, W1S 2PE. The gallery is open Tuesday until Saturday, 10am until 5.30pm (1pm on Saturdays)

2: Sam Cottington – Blanks at London Performance Studios – open now and running until 27th April, “Blanks can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre”. We did already feature this one but hey, we know some people only ever read this five recommended art thing pages

London Performance Studios is pleased to present BLANKS, a major new commission by Associate Artist Sam Cottington, in which the languages of sculpture and performance are brought into counterpoint with the apparatus of the exhibition and the theatre. BLANKS can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre, in which objects and staging act as stand-ins for various modes of discursive production and the publics that such discourse might bring to life…. more here: ORGAN PREVIEW: Sam Cottington’s new installation and interactive readymades | BLANKS, at London Performance Studios…

London Performance Studios is found at the Penarth Centre, Penarth Street, London, SE15 1TR. More details here

3: Apocalyptic Changes of State at Brushes With Greatness – On now and running until 28th April – “BWG Gallery presents Apocalyptic Changes of State, a two-floored, multi-environment exhibition featuring sculptures, paintings and drawings by an outstanding international line-up of 21 artists. The show invites spectators to undertake rites of passage needed to reveal, reflect upon and adapt to the present epoch of ever-accelerating apocalyptic flux; which affects all human and non-human beings”. Well BWG were one of the very few genuine highlights of a rather hit ‘n Miss London Art Fair back at the start of the year so let’s see what they have to offer.

“We are on the precipice of the current Anthropocene, a quagmire of social and economic polarity, potentially an era of devastation, or a turning point in human revelation and enlightenment. Global media perpetuates divisive fear and discourse, failing to pay heed to the inner and outer apocalypses (revelations) ignited in response to the culmination of millennia of humanity’s cognitive and practical evolution. As we experience revolutions in faith, folklore, paganism and spirituality, sobering changes to the environment and natural order, globalisation bringing new understanding of culture, heritage, identity, connectivity and community, alongside increasing advancements in industry, technology and science, we are being driven to undergo a defining natural cultural awakening.

Apocalyptic Changes of State displays both contemporary art’s potential to act, in dialogue, as a primary conduit through which trans-binary ways of perceiving and thinking about the past, present and future can flow; and how an artist’s unique vision has the capacity to illuminate realities beyond the darkening veil of modernity”.

Artists – Alfie Rouy | Alison Poon | Amos Nappo | Angélique Nagovskaya | Catriona Robertson | Cayetano Sanz de Santamaria | Colette LaVette | Dannielle Hodson | Emily Hana | Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou | Harry Rüdham | Hira Gedikoglu | James Dearlove | Joe Grieve | Jonathan Roson | Hyunjun Cho | Maria Andrievskaya | Maxim Burnett | Pau Aguiló Hernandez | Théo Viardin | Vasilis Avramidis

You find BWG at 4 Garden Walk, Shoreditch, London, EC1A 4A. Open 10am until 7pm seven days a week. Here’s the BWG Linktree with all their latest links and what have yer.

That time at the London Art Fair back at the start of an art year that still hasn’t quite kicked off – ORGAN THING: Searching for the positives at the London Art Fair – there was Marie Elisabeth Merlin and Alice Wilson and James Dearlove and Olivia Strange and Henry Ward and Alistair Gow and yeah, on the whole…

4: A Mighty Gust at Four Corners – 23rd until 29th April 2024 – “Green (Yong Woon Park), Francis Payne and Romulo Gonçalves are pleased to present their new paintings in an exhibition titled A Mighty Gust. The exhibition will take place in the Four Corners ground floor gallery”

“Green (Yong Woon Park) makes dynamic large scale paintings, working with unmixed oil paint on raw canvas. His work is vividly colourful, often humorous and marked by a powerful, affective gesture. For Green, the process of painting is one where emotion flows freely, it has directness to it that the every day life lacks. His subject matter weaves motifs from contemporary culture and politics, especially its guttural movements, with mythical elements and the natural world. Green is concerned with the moral failings of contemporary life.

Francis Payne makes works using laser cutters and 3D printers. Usually small in scale, the works are abundant in detail, texture and imagery. Payne uses plant based resin, pigment as well as industrial elements like spray paints or MDF. Concerned largely with historic painting of Renaissance, Baroque and Romanticism, he uses photographic images from his daily life collaged and laser engraved onto prepared surfaces. Those may be cast or full of hand gestures, brush strokes and fingerprints. For Payne painting is a journey towards sublime, and it is a fire hidden in a mundane reality.

Romulo Gonçalves works primarily on paper and canvas using various media like ink, pigments, acrylic and pencil. Visually his work reconciles abstract expressionism with an instinctive form of figuration; a figuration within a phenomena. Gonçalves works from memory and is specifically drawn to its elusive character. The process of painting, that sometimes takes months, is a process of returning. It is also a form of carrying something from outside into within. Gonçalves’ work regards humanity and nature, his hope is for it to be a reminder of our connection with the Natural World

Green, Payne, and Gonçalves met at Bow Arts’ Lakeside Centre, where they worked in neighbouring studios. All being through and through painters they developed professional and personal friendships.

The theme of the exhibition, A Mighty Gust reflects on the energy, volatility and poetics, that in various ways mark the practices of all three artists. The movement in which painting is resolved can be swift, awe inspiring, beautiful and terrifying. Painting, like history, is a disaster. It is also a triumph that reaches for the highest peaks that visually minded people can achieve. As painters, Green, Payne, and Gonçalves navigate between those poles”

Four Corners is at 121 Roman Road, London, E2 0QN. The space is open Tuesday through to Saturday, 10am to 6pm

5: Marc Almond – Deities and Demons at 4 Flitcroft St Gallery – Very much a word of mouth thing at a new space that yer man Sean Mclusky has been talking about for some time. A new gallery and venue just off Denmark Street. A Marc Almond show has quietly opened with little fanfare, it opened last night.  “I was so touched that a large crowd came out to see my hospital Art . Thank God all those years at Leeds Poly Fine Art dept weren’t entirely wasted. The name neon is to jog everyone’s aged memories who I am”.

“Deities and Demons is an exhibition of original collage mood board’s, pagan self portraits,  personal ephemera and memorabilia”

4 Flitcroft St Gallery is at 4 Flitcroft St, WC1, just off Denmark St, London. 12pm until 6pm so we think? Details are at best vague, The exhibition is on every day till May 2nd..

Coming up….