Another week, another Five Art Things thing, That’s a George Blacklock piece hanging in his current show at Flowers Gallery up there, a recently recommended exhibibition here and recently reviewed on these fractured pages – It is surely about the way George Blacklock uses both paint and colour, the liberating decisions he makes? Alchemy is on at Flowers, Cork Street, London right now, that was last week though (well the review was, the show goes on) and as we catch our breath after the opening weekend of Condo and the thing that is or now was the London Art Fair and London settles down a little terms of art we are still wondering if we should carry on with all this this year? All this endless (thankless, or at best all this taken for granted) art coverage? Years of it. Should it all just knocked on the head, just get back to the dog eat dog world of being an artist? Is there really much point in all this art coverage?
Or shall we just get on with it and never mind the bliss or the selfies in front of the art or whatever we said last time? We don’t need an editorial here do we? Normal service is miles away from being resumed, am I still falling out of love with art? Did I say that last time? And the time before? Are we done here?
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: Sam Lipp, Base at Soft Opening – On now and until 4th March 2026 – We’ll start this week’s five by going back to this already opened show in the East London space, we have already covered it on these pages as part of our Condo Feature, it isn’t part of Condo, however… well go read the feature – Exploring East London’s part in Condo, that and Sam Lipp at Soft Opening, Hana Miletić at The Approach alongside New York’s Margot Samel Gallery presenting the work of Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia…
Here’s what the gallery have to say about the show…
“Base looks toward the foundation, to the degraded, stepped-over core of existence. The culmination of a decade’s development of material practice, Sam Lipp’s new series of paintings use the artist’s signature combination of oil on steel, including one work on a steel medical box. A third medium, frottage – Lipp’s distinctive process of mark-making through friction with sidewalk cement – emphasises these paintings’ unusual sturdiness while also testifying to ideas of bodily vulnerability and decay. A term used to describe the sexual rubbing of bodies against each other, frottage denotes the place where the harsh wear of urban existence and the circulation of the libidinal economy meet. In Lipp’s work, the marks left by the abrasion simultaneously resemble the remnants of an incompletely erased idea, the grotesque elegance of self-harm scars, and the ubiquitous wear visible on street signs and other civic infrastructure.
Arranged in a filmic sequence, the tripartite colourway system that orders the paintings begins with the earthy and bloody, before moving into greyish tones reminiscent of old videotape, and culminating in overexposed white. The structure the sequence provides hints at an undisclosed narrative, while also asking what the image, placed under the pressure of certain limits, can become. Affixed with screws, the paintings hint toward a utilitarian past while loudly announcing their present status as commodities. Again and again, we are compelled to confront the image as a property relation.
Lipp’s practice excels in drawing attention to how, in Christopher Chitty’s words, “the commodity form has transformed the essential coordinates of human sexuality.” Figures are depicted in closeup, often in poses of erotic recline that speaks to both a knowing pleasure taken in – and defiance of – the viewer’s gaze. The tattooed hand foregrounded in Censer beckons teasingly, emphasising the trompe l’oeil effect of the medical box while instilling a surgical fantasy of opening up the figure’s torso to reveal what’s inside. The tight frame and reduction of bodies to their parts creates a vague sense of visual claustrophobia that brings to mind the cramped dimensions of the screen, the zoom function, the camera lens: an image that draws attention to its own production. An awareness of how images arrive to us pre-circulated surrounds these works, most obviously denoted by Lipp’s recurrent interest in the Getty Images watermark. Here, again, we are invited to reencounter the ultrafamiliar tropes of existence in capitalism, the signs and gestures that invite us in, and those that keep us out.
Everywhere, Lipp draws our attention to surface: to the complexity of its topography, to the image that announces itself as such. The glimpse, the hint, the archetype are prioritised over the search for an inner depth, as demonstrated by the works’ titles (Vagabond, Illegalist, Star). Evoking character types, these words eschew fantasies of bourgeois individuality even as the paintings themselves capture arrestingly particular expressions. In the same way, Lipp toys with depth, never letting us forget the image’s flimsiness, its ethereality. The screws piercing the paintings manually puncture the process of high-speed circulation, as if without them, they might float away, absorbed back into the manic highway of information, property, labour, and lust from which they came”. – Asa Seresin
Further reading on these pages – ORGAN THING: Condo 2026 Pt.1 – Exploring East London’s part in Condo, that and Sam Lipp at Soft Opening, Hana Miletić at The Approach alongside New York’s Margot Samel Gallery presenting the work of Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia…
Soft Opening is found at 6 Minerva Street, London E2 9EH. The gallery is open Wednesday through to Saturday, midday until 6pm. The Sam Lipp exhibition is on until 14th March 2026.
2: Basil Beattie, Another Place: Paintings from the 90s at Hales – 29th Jan until 28th Feb 2026 with an “opening” on 31st January (2pm until 4pm) although how that works when the show will already have opened and those times are within regular gallery opening hours we’re not sure? The ongoing mystery of art gallery workings. Enough of the mysteries, you canjsut walking during opening hours and explore good art at Hales and this one looks especially good.
“A key figure in the development of post-war British abstraction, Beattie (b. 1935, West Hartlepool, UK) is known for his gestural, painterly compositions. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, he has carved out a rigorously process-based practice deeply concerned with the experiential and psychological qualities of painting.
The exhibition takes its title from the monumental painting Another Place, which anchors the show alongside a body of smaller-scale works. Together, they showcase Beattie’s distinctive visual language and mark a pivotal decade of artistic development. From the late 1980s onwards, Beattie began to move away from pure abstraction, introducing simple motifs that became a resource of infinite possibility. He recognised that abstraction and mark-making could more fully express subjective experience when formal elements took on some of the characteristics of recognisable objects.
Often architectural in suggestion, Beattie’s motifs imply doors, ladders, towers, and corridors-spaces that invite or resist entry, sometimes dissolving into more elusive shapes. Combined with the physical handling of paint, these pictograms communicate aspects of the artist’s inner life and psychological state.
Another Place has an imposing physical presence, featuring two columns of thickly painted arcs and a door-like opening that emanates light from within a dark field. Rectangular tunnels and thresholds recur throughout the exhibition, echoed across the smaller works, which maintain the same muscularity and material density. The thickness of the paint is of central importance: Beattie has described his most successful works as possessing a kind of potency, hovering in space with a molten quality, as if the paint has reached its melting point.
During the 1990s, Beattie developed his major Witness series, in which earlier grid-based compositions were distorted into free-standing forms. The central ziggurat motif-constructed from compartmentalised sections-holds deep personal significance. Works such as Witness and Tower combine layered gestural marks with distinct architectural blocks rising to a point, recalling the ancient towers of Babylon.
The 1990s were a defining era of critical and formal development for Beattie. His triumphant use of the pictogram communicates not only an image drawn from the real world, but a profound and embodied experience.
Paintings from this period are in the collections of Tate, London; Birmingham City Museum and Gallery, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery; MIMA; and Arts Council England. Beattie graduated from the Royal Academy schools in 1961 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2006. He lives and works in London.
Hales Gallery is found at The Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, London, E1 6LA. You find the actually gallery entrance on the main street itself and not in the Tea Building, directly over the road from that awful Boxpark place. The gallert is open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11am until 6pm. The show runs from 10th November until 17th December 2022 with an 10th November opening, 6pm until 8pm
3: Georg Wilson, Against Nature at Pilar Corrias (Savile Row) – 30th Jan until 7th Mar 2026 – “Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Against Nature, a solo exhibition of new works by Georg Wilson, the artist’s first with the gallery since the announcement of her representation last year, and the follow up to her debut institutional exhibition at Jupiter Artland”. This one is at the Savile Row branch of the gallery, at the Royal Academy end of the street and adjacent to Cork Street.
“This new series of paintings explores the folklore and historic uses of uncultivated poisonous plants, species such as henbane, thorn-apple and nightshade that grow abundantly across the UK, that have long but frequently forgotten histories in both folk and modern medicine. Drawing on historic texts about poisonous flora, Wilson highlights the gradual erosion of plant knowledge in Britain, a process that began as early as the fifteenth century, following the enclosure of common land and the subsequent rise of industrialisation”.
Pilar Corrias (Savile Row) is found 2 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PA. The space is open Tuesday to Friday, 11am until 6pm.
4: Kuda Mushangi, Familiar Spaces at Glasshouse Contemporary – 31st Jan until 1st March 2026 with an opening on 30th Jan, 4pm until 9pm – London-based painter Kuda Mushangi explores the architecture of the everyday. Recognised by Tate Modern and Tate Collective in 2020 as an exciting emerging artist, he has been awarded a number of those establishment awards in recent times but don’t hold that against him, something interesting emerging here from an artist worth watch.
“In this new collection of works Kuda translates domestic interiors into layered compositions of shape, pattern and colour. Drawing on his background in architecture, he approaches each canvas as a blueprint for emotion – examining how spatial design holds memory and shapes human experience. Through recognisable forms and imagery he captures the quiet joys of interiors and the playfulness found in familiar spaces. His paintings celebrate how the geometry of the everyday can hold memory, warmth, and delight”.
Glasshouse Contemporary is found at 91 Lower Clapton Rd, London, E5 0NP. The space is open Tuesday until Sunday, 11am until 6pm (5pm Sundays)
5: Claude Cahun Month at Torriano Meeting House – “Claude Cahun Month presents a February-long exhibition and events programme celebrating the life, work and legacy of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—key figures in Surrealism, queer modernism and political resistance”. Now this looking interesting, and good to see things still happening at Torriano Meeting House, scene of many Stonehenge Festival campaign meetings as well as the base for one of the FIN Cells (and strange cars parked out side watching who was going in and out) back in the last century. We’ll put it all in the book one day, enough of that though, you’ll have to wait for the book, on with the news of the month…
“Claude Cahun Month presents a February-long exhibition and events programme celebrating the life, work and legacy of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore – key figures in Surrealism, queer modernism and political resistance. The programme includes an exhibition of photomontage and photographic works, alongside talks, workshops, poetry, performance, music and film. Contributors include writers, artists, scholars, translators and performers engaging with Cahun and Moore’s collaborative practice, experimental writing, gender radicalism and enduring influence”
Torriano Meeting House is at 99 Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London, NW5 2RX. The space is open Tuesday through to Sunday, 10am until 6pm. Full programme details and booking go here. The exhibition may be viewed at the Private View on Saturday 7 February (6.30–8.00 pm) and before and after scheduled events throughout the month.
Previously on these pages…
THE ORGAN 