Here we go then, on with the new art year and Five Art Things, on we go and never mind the bliss or whatever we said last time, although this week, after what happened in the United States last night it just got a little harder to just carry on with the five art things thing as well as everything else. Frankly last night’s election result was depressing, the world just got a little more dangerous and well, let’s hope that art is still some kind of force for good and once again this is about this week and next and needing more (just more, nothing less) and yes you are right, I guess, for that is what we do now, guess, I guess we need to post another five. Here, for what any of this is worth are 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 as we repeat ourselves. 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: Condo London 2025 – Kicking off this weekend, 18th/19th January, a collaborative exhibition/event by 49 galleries across 22 London spaces, we did already write a preview with links to all the spaces and places back in December when the event was first announced, it almost upon us now though. The now back to annual again after last year’s post Covid return, the London Art event (with the ever annoying website) that kind of kickstarts the art year (alongside the London Art Fair) will happen this year between 18th January and 15th February 2025 although to get the best out of it you really should focus on the opening preview weekend of Saturday and Sunday 18th/19th January when all the galleries involved should be open from Midday until 6pm on both days, lots more details via this previous feature where you can find a full list of galleries and such – ORGAN PREVIEW: Condo London 2025 has just been announced. A collaborative exhibition by 49 galleries across 22 London spaces to kick start London’s art year…

2: Jennifer Binnie, Forest Visions at Richard Saltoun Gallery – 15th Jan until 1st Mar 2025. This one should be good for your soul, Jennifer Binnie is always good for your soul “Richard Saltoun Gallery presents British artist Jennifer Binnie’s (b.1958) inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery”.

“Forest Visions spans paintings and works on paper from the 1980s to the present day, celebrating over four decades of Binnie’s pioneering practice that converges influences from folklore, spirituality, feminism, and ecological thought. This exhibition follows Binnie’s recent inclusion in major institutional shows such as Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 at Tate Britain, now touring at the National Galleries of Scotland (2024/25), and RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at the Barbican Centre (2024).

Jennifer Binnie emerged as a pivotal figure in British art during the early 1980s, as co-founder of the Neo Naturists, an important performance art group formed in 1981 with her sister, Christine Binnie, and Wilma Johnson. Rooted in the subculture of the New Romantic club scene, the Neo Naturists developed amid the transformative economic, political, and social shifts of the era. Binnie’s distinctive solo practice developed in parallel, as she started exhibiting her paintings with gallerist James Birch in London from the 80s onwards, garnering critical praise from many. Her artistic language has since developed around a persistent exploration of dissolving hierarchies between the human and non-human; her paintings depict mysterious forests humming with unseen energies; animals acting as guides and companions; and human figures merging with trees and landscapes, suggesting a shared life source”.

Richard Saltoun Gallery is found at 41 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NS. The Gallery is open Tuesday through to Saturday, 10am to 6pm (11am until 5pm on Saturdays). Previous Organ coverage of the Gallery

3: Veronica Fernandez, I Should Have Prayed For Other People at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery – opening on 17th Jan and on until 16th Feb 2025 with an opening evening of Thursday 16th January, 6pm until 8pm – “Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present I Should Have Prayed For Other People, American artist Veronica Fernandez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery”.

“Fernandez’s paintings offer dreamlike windows into childhood memories, narrating raw anxieties alongside moments of understated joy and innocence. These psychological spaces are influenced by the characters, sights, and sounds of the artist’s own upbringing as her family experienced financial insecurity, travelling between temporary housing solutions across the East Coast of the United States. The children play in motel rooms, on sofa beds and beneath chain-link fences, or they exist in expansive, oneiric fields amidst burning objects and horizons. However, despite the weight of the routine hardships they face, they are curious and affectionate, determined to find delight amongst their tribulations.

In the exhibition title, I Should Have Prayed For Other People, Fernandez gives voice to each of her subjects, narrating their guilt for being unable to fully take care of one another from their own precarious positions. Although the paintings are imbued with an emotional urgency – the panic of the smoke alarm going off, the grief of a pet dying, or the fear of an intruder’s presence – the children themselves play out moments of accountability and adult mundanity. With no supervisory presence, they fold their laundry in The Years, tend to their own nosebleeds in Everything Bleeds Brown, bake their own birthday cakes in Summer Inside (I’m Going To Make You A Home), and penny pinch, using a water bottle as a makeshift piggy-bank in Stages of Grief. In these small gestures and symbols, the works are portraits of their resilience: children who are driven by compassion and survival, eager to distance themselves from the dysfunction and danger of their surroundings.

As the children navigate their own cycles of anxiety and hardship, Fernandez contextualises their emotional rhythms alongside temporal cycles: the change of the seasons, and the natural decay of living things. Autumn leaves scatter the floor in I deserved it, Didn’t I? (Apocalypto), snow melts into the grass in in Stages of Grief, and overripe bananas darken, mottled by fruit flies, in Nausea. In textured whorls of steam or smoke, or abstracted brushwork softening the boundaries between subject and ground, even concrete objects and figures begin to dissolve into space, they too succumbing to the waning forces of Fernandez’s world-building. These entropic and sequential processes mirror the shifting emotions in each painting, as isolation melts into fear, or excitement turns to panic. As she partners emotional intensity with a generative ambiguity, Fernandez asks us to consider the complexities of these childrens’ lives, their wants and needs, their losses and dreams”.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is found at 6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm (11am on Saturday). I Should Have Prayed For Other People runs from 17th Jan until 16th Feb 2025 with an opening evening of Thursday 16th January, 6pm until 8pm

4: Shadi Al-Atallah, Hole at Niru Ratnam Gallery – the exhibition runs from 17th Jan  until 22nd Feb 2025 with an evening opening on Thursday 16th January, 6pm until 8pm –  “Shadi Al-Atallah’s solo exhibition ‘Hole’ takes its cue from the concept of a hole being a site of transformation, production and concealment as well as where new forms of subjectivity are articulated from. In this sense the hole is not an absence or an emptiness, instead for Al-Atallah it can be a portal, a conduit, an opening of the body to the world or a space for what the subject chooses to reveal or hide. Holes are everywhere, and in that sense might be considered mundane or everyday. But holes are also places of wonder, such as the black holes in space which contain matter that has been sucked in and which curve and stretch space-time in a dramatic transformation. Absence and emptiness are reconfigured to become sites of change and pathways to potential infinity. 

As with earlier works by Al-Atallah, the paintings in ‘Hole’ feature distorted figures who are seen in intimate spaces that the viewer might feel they are intruding on. Al-Atallah collects images to begin with to work from; for this series those images come from  film stills, medieval diagrams of space and photos Al-Atallah has taken of windows. They then zoom in on parts of those images to remove them from their original context, fragmenting and reassembling meaning. In this series though, Al-Atallah develops their way of painting the figure. They do this by painting the surroundings around the figure first, and then let the figure then emerge from the space that is created. In this way the figures emerge from nothingness, from the hole left by the areas of paint that have preceded it. In effect the figures are held in place by that which surrounds them, in the way that a hole is held in space by the matter that surrounds it. By extension then, we might think of each of Al-Atallah’s figures as being conceptualised as a hole”.

Niru Ratnam Gallery is found at 71-73 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 7LP. The gallery is open Thursday to Saturday, midday until 6pm. Hole runs from 17th Jan  until 22nd Feb 2025 with an evening opening on Thursday 16th January, 6pm until 8pm. There is also a Eunjo Lee exhbition opening at the gallery on the same night.

5: Not The London Art Fair at Candid Arts Trust – Opening  Wednesday 22nd until Sunday 22nd January with a evening preview that everyone is invited to on Tuesday 21st Jan (6pm until 10pm). Happening pretty much right over the street from the rather conservative monster that last year’s London Art Fair turned out to be, the almost defiant Not The London Art Fair is a group show happening at the rather respected artist-friendly space at Candid Arts Trust, 3-5 Torrens Street, London, England EC1V 1NQ.

STOP PRESS: Turns out, from both first hand experience this week, and from talking to other artists, Candid Arts Trust aren’t quite as artist-friendly as we thought they were. Far from it actually! Watch this space, more next week.

The London Art Fair itself returns, at The Business Design Centre,  52 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 0QH from 22nd until 26the January 2025 (and you do have to pay) – “Highlighting a selection of the best galleries from the UK and beyond. The Fair will offer both seasoned and aspiring collectors a diverse presentation of modern and contemporary art, alongside curated displays, and an inspiring programme of talks, panel discussions and artist insights.  The Fair will include critically-acclaimed sections Encounters and Platform, which seeks to understand the interconnectedness of human society and the natural world. Artist Ya La’ford will unveil an installation in partnership with Fair sponsor Visit Tampa Bay. Additionally, after a successful launch in 2024, the Prints & Editions section will return to cater for first time collectors.  London Art Fair continues to champion and support regional museums through its annual Museum Partnership, which this year invites the celebrated art museum, Sainsbury Centre, to showcase their world-class collection at the Fair”.  

It is a vast fair, there is lots to see, you do need to give it a good few hours to get anywhere near seeing it all and yes, a lot of it is mostly very conservative (and tickets aren’t cheap), but there are always good things to be found. Here’s our take on last year’s event – 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…  

Twelve shots from last year’s London Art Fair

previously on these pages…

ORGAN THING: Taylor Silk’s Soft Domme opening night at East London’s Wilton Way Gallery, so much more than just playful fun…

ORGAN: The twenty art things that stood out in 2024 – Tracey Emin, Lee Bae, Ken Currie, Jeffrey Gibson, those Safehouse shows, Working Girls at Gallery 46, Bianca Raffaella, Ernest Cole, Sadie Hennessey, Peter Kennard, Carol Bove and…