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?

Another week, another Five Art Things thing, That’s a row of Sean Scully pieces at Blain Southern, London from back in October 2018, he has a show opening at Lisson Gallery this week and on with 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 and this clapping with one hand?

Five art things then, 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: Cat Phillipps and Fran Copeman, Land at the Space Pop Up, Hackney – Now this one looked interesting as they were installing earlier today – “Cat Phillipps and Fran Copeman use printmaking to reimagine ideas around land. Appropriating, redrawing, and deconstructing photographic images both artists present how land is imagined, claimed, and contested”, it was all looking rather intriguing in that criminally underused pop up space on Mare Street

“Pushing the boundaries of scale and space within printmaking, Cat and Fran respond to this moment of historical turmoil, establishing a visual resistance to corporate power and land grabs. For Land they bring together two new large-scale works alongside a small publication”.

Fran Copeman is an artist with an expansive practice incorporating installation, drawing, print, video and sound. She explores social and political intersections in the context of land access, protest and ritual.

Cat Phillipps is an artist specialising in radical print techniques and photo-constructivism. With solo and collaborative practices, kennardphillipps, Cat makes work for the street, the gallery, publications and public institutions.

The Space Pop Up space is found (right over the street from the Organ bunker) at 129 Mare Street, Hackney, London, E8 3RH. Land runs for 18th Feb until 22nd Feb 2026, the space is open 12.30 until 6.30pm each day, there is an opening on the evening Thursday 19th, 6 until 9pm 

2: Sean Scully, The Nature of Art at Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street – 18th Feb until 9th May 2026 – Recently dubbed the “greatest living abstract painter” by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, not sure I’d go that far but we do have high regard for Sean Scully here at Organ and yes, the artist’s  abstraction has always held landscape as a touchstone. Lisson are “presenting his 2005 series of photographs from the island of Aran alongside two large-scale paintings and a huge salon-style array of drawings, watercolours, photos and written works on paper, this selection charts the landscape theme throughout his career, revealing how enmeshed the natural world remains to the artist’s ways of seeing and thinking”.

“This specially envisaged wall of Scully’s landscape works, hung in rough chronological order from left to right, begins with an early pencil drawing of a house plant from 1965, produced while he was still a student at the then precursor to Central Saint Martins. Scully then leaps from close botanical study to radical abstraction in the space of just a year or so. A suite of vibrant oil pastels and gouaches from 1965-66 blur traditional horizon lines, rainbows and two figures in a field with a newly abstracted impetus and bold colouration.

Three watercolours from 1984 – depicting a countryside view, rustic houses and a vista from a balcony – lead into further works on paper that develop this medium towards fully abstracted, lined or striped compositions with others composed of cubiform blocks. A group of charcoal works mine the undergrowth and the strata of the earth, while his written pages speak of Scully’s admiration for Monet’s Giverny and how green only entered his painterly vocabulary after 2016, following a long hiatus. Tellingly, passages of abstraction are often combined on the same sheet with recognisable plants or organic motifs, completing the cycle that sets everything flowing from, but also eventually back to, nature – ending with new drawings made in Eleuthera in the last week of 2025.

Photography is a constant throughout this landscape-inflected mini-survey, from Moroccan walls and Sienese doors through to shorelines and woodpiles, and is reiterated in the iconic 2005 Aran series of 24 black-and-white photographs taken on the eponymous island off the west coast of Ireland exhibited nearby. Scully’s affinity with the ancient traditions of layering and stacking present in the rough-hewn stacks of rocks, the horizontal bands and tessellating gestures that his photography reveals, becomes clear. Two large paintings, including a classic, five-banded Landline and another Moroccan-influenced oil on aluminium, complete the presentation”.

Lisson Gallery is at 67 Lisson Street, London, NW1 5BY. The gallery is open Tuesday through to Sunday, 10am until 6pm. The Nature of Art runs from 18th Feb until 9th May 2026.

Previously on these pages – ORGAN: Frieze Week Part Two, avoiding the art fair madness? The excitement of those Sean Scully paintings at Blain/Southern, punchbags, red roads, goose feathers and a strong 21st Century Women show at Unit…

3: Kevin Kane, Uncultivated Gods at Stomach – 20th Feb until 24th Feb 2026 with an opening on Thursday 19th Feb, 7pm until 10pm –  “Uncultivated Gods is an exhibition by Kevin Kane exploring modern forms of worship through painting, sculpture, installation and performance, examining power, devotion and belief in contemporary life”.

“Uncultivated Gods is a new exhibition by Kevin Kane, bringing together painting, sculpture, installation and live performance to examine contemporary forms of worship. The exhibition considers the belief systems, desires and structures of power that shape modern life, often operating unnoticed or unquestioned. Rather than focusing on traditional religion, the works explore devotion as it appears today, embedded in celebrity, politics, money and social rituals, asking what has been allowed to flourish without notice, and what might – or should – instead deserve our attention.

The Work – The exhibition presents a series of paintings, sculpture, installation and performance that approach worship not as a fixed belief, but as a psychological and social condition. Figures, objects and materials function as stand-ins for modern gods: power, visibility, identity, aspiration and control.  Kane will present an altar at which to pay homage to the world of celebrity, power and where the natural world can be transgressed. At the back of the altar, as is traditional, will be a painting of a familiar deity, selfie-ready. Towering over this painting, a 3 metre-high inflatable sculpture will be presented, and viewers will be invited to give offerings to ensure the gods remain contented.

Paintings will include scenes of heaven imagined from a queer viewpoint, alongside landscapes inspired by an episode of the 1969 TV series Civilisation,  entitled The Worship of Nature. An animatronic beating heart encased in a ceramic shell raises the question of whether we truly need love to be happy. 

Performance / Preview Event – The exhibition opens with a live performance at the preview event on 19th February 2026. Ten ballet dancers, accompanied by live vocals and a specially composed sound work, will present a piece designed to explore the idols that we worship, and the important deities we neglect.  The work has been choreographed by Dan Baines, who recently starred in the ballet adaption of Quadrophenia at Sadler’s Wells and, more recently, in Broadway NYC.  Sound has been arranged by Massimo Paramour (Torture Garden, Roast) with vocals provided by Rhian Guerrero.  The performance will conclude with a DJ set, transforming the preview into a collective ritualistic ceremony.

About the Artist – Kevin Kane is an artist working across painting, sculpture, print, installation and moving image, with a practice centred on contemporary portraiture and human relationships. His work explores identity, desire and social structures through a queer lens, often examining the tension between emotional experience and analytical systems of thought.
 Kane is currently completing a BA in Contemporary Portraiture at Art Academy London. His work has been exhibited with the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, the Scottish Portrait Awards and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Exhibition. He is a co-founder of Cardion Arts alongside Gemma Rolls-Bentley”.  

Stomach is at Arch 402, which, if we have it right is the big Hoxton Arch space so I guess Stomach is or are doing some kind of pop up thing there. The address is 37 Cremer Street, London, E2 8HD. Right by Hoxton railway station. The show runs from 20th Feb until 24th Feb 2026 with an opening on Thursday 19th Feb, 7pm until 10pm. The space is open Friday until Tuesday, Midday until 5pm.  Kevin Kane on Instagram

4: Ben Jamie, Deep Time at James Freeman Gallery – from 20th Feb until 14th March 2026, with an opening on Friday 20th, 6.30pm until 8.30pm –  “Deep Time is an exhibition of paintings by the London based artist Ben Jamie. Ben Jamie’s paintings travel the grand arc of history to reach deep into the foundations of the earth and its cultures. His landscapes are raw organic places, scenes of a world in the process of formation. Rock and river move with leviathan intent, oozing with the energy of creation. A golden light saturated with mineral dust hangs across every view. In the midst of these formations, characters appear like titans emerging from the stuff of the earth: a colossus dripping with time from his hoary beard; a fallen hero lying in a lake in a forest glade. These are narrative archetypes from the depths of storytelling, as much part of the process of creation as the land. In his paintings Ben Jamie traces a connection between the ages of the earth and the ancient beginnings of shared culture, depicting them as distinct strands of one vast interconnected web, a greater entity both concrete and conscious.

Deep Time features a number of Ben’s most recent ‘tree’ paintings that consider the forest as a giant life form, something far older, more productive and more expansive than humanity. These paintings describe trees as abstract visual webs of writhing trunks and branches, where hard-to-discern patterns suggest journeys and pathways that are too complex to map. In these works, trees become their own landscapes, spreading and sprawling with creative energy.

The physical nature of paint is just as important as what is being described. Ben’s works emerge from layers of impasto built up and worked back like geological strata. This lends the paintings considerable weight and substance. Graphic hard-edge marks echo the rocks and branches they describe; colour patches float and combine like camouflage, partly hiding, partly revealing their subject. Reading the mark making becomes a matter of delving into layers of paint that are packed tight like muscle, to be pried apart in order to reveal the hidden histories within. It is lush, physical, meaty painting, appropriate to its subject”. 

James Freeman Gallery is at 354 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 0PD – the show runs from 20th Feb until 14th March 2026 . The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11am until 6.30pm. The opening evening view is on Friday 20th Feb, 6.30pm until 8.30pm.  

5: Joyce Edwards, A Story of Squatters at Four Corners Gallery – on now and until 21st March – “This exhibition celebrates a remarkable body of work by the late photographer Joyce Edwards. Shown for the first time, it focuses on an extraordinary grassroots housing movement. Edwards, a Hampstead landlady turned passionate documentarian, ventured into the East End nearly 50 years ago to photograph the young squatters who were transforming derelict streets into vibrant, if precarious, homes.

Edwards passed away in 2023, just months before her hundredth birthday, leaving behind a substantial legacy of fine photographs. Nearly lost to time, a recent discovery and archiving effort has brought her images back into the light. In the 1970s, Edwards began photographing squats across London, a journey which took her from the affluent Bishops Avenue to the heart of Bethnal Green. There she encountered ‘the Triangle’, three streets near Victoria Park, where empty houses were being squatted by young people seeking an inexpensive way of life. Over two years, Edwards took their portraits, creating an intimate and richly detailed record of a unique community.  

The squatters’ story is one of resilience and self-determination. The community of the Triangle established a Housing Co-op, convincing the Greater London Council to sell them the freeholds to the properties. Today, the Grand Union Housing Co-op continues to thrive. As Pete Bishop says, “The Co-op survives because of the involvement of the members and that we are fully mutual and, crucially, because our 1981 constitution includes a No Right to Buy clause.”

The exhibition brings together Edwards’ compelling portraits of the musicians, painters, actors, students, radicals and local people that occupied the Grand Union squats, alongside photographs taken by the squatters themselves that capture the creativity of Triangle life. Together, these images form an unprecedented visual record of an East London community that refused to disappear”.

EXHIBITION TALKS AND SCREENINGS

March 12  6.30pm – 8.30pm: Dr Lucy Brownson on Feminist squats in north London. March 19 6.30pm – 8.30pm: In coversation with Tom Hunter (photographer) and Leonie Rousham (filmmaker). The gallery will also be hosting Reclaiming Spaces, a series of film screenings exploring themes of Queer, green, migrant and feminist spaces and the intersections in-between them. 

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

And while we’re here, the latest Cultivate on-line exhibition just opened, here’s the link to explore some of the recent work of Birmingham-based painter Edgington. Coming next week Recent work from Mark Burrell.