David Hepher – The Elegy of Robin Hood Gardens at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, October 2025 – Now of all the shows opening during Frieze Week this year, or shows already happening around all the fun of the fair, this latest David Hepher exhibition was the one we were most anticipating around here. The recent show of his over at the sister Flowers Gallery at the start of 2025 over in East London remains one of the powerful highlights in terms of this year’s art exhibitions. Anticipation was high on the Tuesday evening before Frieze, anticipation is always high in the immediate run up to the first day of Frieze, there was a number of significant openings in an around Cork Street on the night before the Fair kicked off, as well as a number of already happening shows staying open late. A chance to see Brandon Ndife’s excellent Palimpsests show along the street at Holtermann Fine Art for a second time (just as good as it was first time around), to check out the busy Sabine Moritz opening at the bigger of the two Pilar Corrias West End Galleries (more about that one in a moment) as well as a rather strong Sagarika Sundaram opening at Alison Jacques Gallery just along Cork Street from Flowers (more about that one in a moment as well). Once again we’re playing catch up here, this was the Tuesday evening before the Wednesday opening day of the fair (there has been something  like 12,000 words written about the fair itself on these pages and that’s before we get to the other art shaped things covered during the week, we are still catching up on other things that happened like the opening of the latest David Hepher show).     

Flowers Gallery quite rightly said ahead of the opening that they were “delighted to announce The Elegy of Robin Hood Gardens” as jthey went on to tell of “a solo exhibition by acclaimed British artist David Hepher (b. 1935). Now in his 91st year, much of David Hepher’s practice has been dedicated to a sustained examination of London’s tower blocks, Brutalist architecture, and urban housing estates. Within this exhibition Hepher surveys the Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, East London. Often on a large scale, working on concrete primed surfaces layered with graffiti motifs, splatters of paint, and pictographic symbols and imagery, Hepher reflects on the legacy of this landmark estate. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, Robin Hood Gardens stood as a bold experiment in social housing. Since 2017, the estate has been largely demolished, making way for commercial redevelopment and high-density private housing — a fate shared by many Brutalist projects across London. A significant example of Brutalist architecture, the Victoria & Albert Museum acquired a three-storey section including exterior façades and interiors of the Gardens in 2017, which is currently on display at the V&A East Storehouse, London”.

It is an utter treat to see these latest David Hepher pieces in the raw flesh, to just stand before the strength of the canvases, to be within touching distance the weight of them, of that concrete (I imagine the hang itself was interesting, the actual physical business of hanging the pieces on the wall). The Subdued lighting of the Cork Street space makes taking anywhere near decent photos almost impossible (sorry), it works perfectly if you are actually in the space viewing the work in real life, you can’t help but be drawn in to the formal beauty of the pieces, the power of the structures, of the grid-like grandness of it all, and yes, the beauty of the decay, the humanity in those marks of decay. I love David Hepher’s work, it is so tempting to go grill him about his work, he is standing just over there and seems more than happy to talk about it, somehow I don’t want to though, I like the questions these buildings throw out, I like trying to read them without resorting to the horses mouth, I like thinking I know what they’re about when the reality is I probably have it wrong, I don’t want the answers to the questions I would like to ask the artist, it is that there’s a mystery to them, I just like the way the paintings, the marks, the flaws, the graffiti and the concrete to the talking.          

“Drawn to the formal beauty of their grid-like structures as well as the physical and emotional residues left by their inhabitants, Hepher began painting the Gardens in 2022, from his photographs taken a decade before. Enlarging the photographs and printing them on the canvas, Hepher begins by layering the canvas with concrete structural elements, replicating a builder’s application of material. Within the works, details such as graffiti tags, a childlike drawing of a red house emitting smoke, and orange arrows flying across the painting provide intimate symbolic counterpoints to the monumental façades, grounding the iconic buildings in the lived experience of their residents, as Hepher reflects on how the structures continue to shape memory and community.  The looming scale of the works, including The Little John Facade, 2024, at over two metres square, underscores both the alienation and social inequalities these buildings have come to represent as Hepher negotiates a space between memorial and critical acknowledgement of systemic and architectural failure”.

It would be fair to say that, on the surface, this is more of the same from David Hepher, that it could be the work of no one else, that is exactly the same as we saw last time back at the start of the year at the far bigger East London Flowers space, but then you look closer, you start to clue in to the fact that Friar Tuck and Little John have been there, that the Sheriff of Nottingham might have been involved in knocking down the social housing, the homes of people, you start to clue in to the undertones and the love some had for the flawed estate and the community housed in those blocks, the doors to people’s homes, the children who grew up there and you see that these pieces might be from the same place as last time but really they’re from a whole different place (and not so many Millwall fans in Poplar as there were back there in the South London tower blocks of last time). I love the humanity of David Hepher’s work, the beauty he finds. 

And what is happening in that one, the repeat, the mirror repeat? That throws out a whole load more to try and read, I really am having to stop myself going over and just asking him what his thinking was there but then I want to think about it it myself, I don’t want the answers, I want this running around my head debating with me for as long as possible. (sw)     

Flowers Cork Street is found at 21 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LZ. The Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm. The David Hepher exhibition runs until 15th November 2025

Previously

ORGAN THING: David Hepher at Flowers Gallery’s big East London space. A celebration of the austere grandeur of high-rise concrete, of the reality of life and of course, a celebration of an artist…

As always. do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show (although I image there’s far better imagery to be found on the Gallery’s own website)…