We don’t need an editorial here do we? Another week, another Five Art Things thing and on with all this endless 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 all this clapping with one hand? Answers on a postcard to somewhere ot other….

Actually this week we probably do need an editorial, the art coverage on these pages really has fallen of a cliff in recent times, we have been saying for weeks that we’re just not feeling that excited by the various branches of the London art scene right now. We’re looking at listings and gallery mailouts, at press releases and the annoyance of artists who clearly think it all starts and finishes with a bloody Instagram story, that and just showing their art to each other and really not wanting to engage with anyone outside of their immediate peer group. I really am wondering if I’m that bothered about any of it right now? It isn’t that we haven’t been going to shows, checking out shows, searching for shows, far from it although for the first time in years last weekend I found myself passing a gallery I’ve been in many times amd normally wouldn’t dream of passing, they had a new show on, I knew it was a new one, one I hadn’t seen, I was on my way to Whitechapel to buy fruit, and for the first time in years I walked passed a gallery without going in. I mean, I walked up to the door, I started to push it and then I thought to myself, you know what, f**k it, I’l just go get a big bag of oranges. The London Art Scene really isn’t inspiring anything much right now and that invite today to some show with some guy spray painting stencils of Mickey Bloody Mouse on a gallery wall hasn’t really helped much, I mean really, Mickey Bloody Mouse stencils in 2026 for flip sake?! That’s a photo of one of our many Cultivate shows up there, that was a lifetime ago…

Enough of this, shut up, get one with it. 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: Manon Wertenbrock, In guts and heads at Rose Easton – on now and until 25th April 2026 – I did go to this one the day, not sure if it was the space afforded each piece as much as it was the pieces themselves, the less is more of the entire exhibition, one of my favourite shows of recent times, I really should write about it. I probably take the gallery’s own words here by way of soem information for you, I won’t, it is on just to walk into. There’s a long text about the show on the gallery’s website, I haven’t read it, I won’t until I’ve written something about it myself (if indeed I ever do get around to writing something, been meaning to for a couple of weeks now). Here’s another #43SecondFilm…

Rose Easton is at 223 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London, E2 0EL. The space is open Wednesday until Saturday, midday until 6pm 

2: Kunstindustrie at Seventeen Gallery – Maybe this one will unblock things? Who knows, I guess the only way to find out is to go and find out and at least, if nothing else, the short show statement maybe hints at something (maybe? Watch this space, see if a review appears, bit of an annoying exhibition title, not sure about that venn diagram) – “Kunstindustrie brings together twenty-five artists. Some were found through the usual channels; one or two were reached via Instagram DM. They do not share a movement nor an aesthetic; rather, it is the condition of making work now inside what Riegl’s title names: the art industry of their time. The exhibition resists the convention of grouping artists under a single, vague conceptual umbrella, “dreams,” “nature,” “Freudian symbolism” or “being young” in favour of attending to the formal choices that actually emerge when aesthetics are shaped by constraint. What does an artist do when the market rewards the fashionable? When the conceptual offers total autonomy, but rarely attracts buyers? When the absurd has longevity but no immediate commercial purchase? Kunstindustrie takes the aesthetic categories within the show at face value, acknowledging their individual purpose”.

Kunstindustrie is curated by Charlotte Seux and Lydia Eliza Trail and features the art of Sam Anderson, Connor Crawford, Piotr Dluzniewski, Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Adam Farah-Saad, Ben Garbus, Solomon Garçon, Isa Genzken, Matt Gess, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Alex Heard, Morag Keil, Raheel Khan, Marc Kokopeli, Eric Kroll, Giulia Ley, Reba Maybury, Dan Mitchell, Georgie Nettell, Ewa Poniatowska, Will Sheridan Jr, Sean Steadman, Sabina Van der Linden, Dan Vogt, Bedros Yeretzian.

Seventeen Gallery is at 270-276 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DG. The show runs from 2nd April – 16th May. The space is open Wednesday to Saturday 11am – 6pm. The entrance is found on Acton Mews to rear of the building, here’s a map

3: Rocco And His Brothers, The Good, the Bad, the God and Her Lover at Stolen Space – We have already previewed this one, it is one of the few art shows (is show the right word here?) that we’re genuinely looking forward to right now, here the Organ preview from a few days back, that piece will give you the background and the details you need, Rocco and His Brothers offer a few more questions, s bit of a challenge in terms of art on the street – The Good, the Bad, the God and Her Lover, an exhibition by Rocco and His Brothers opens at London’s Stolen Space on April 9th…

The Good, the Bad, the God and Her Lover opens at the East London space called Stolen Space with an evening reception on April 9th 2026, 6-8pm.  The exhibition then runs until 10th May

Stolen Space is at 17 Osborn Street, Whitechapel, London, E1 6TD. The gallery is open Thursday and Friday: 11 – 5pm and Saturday and Sunday : 12 – 4pm.

4: Wilhelm Sasnal, family/history at Sadie Coles HQ/Savile Row – Just opened and on until 23rd May 2026 – “Wilhelm Sasnal’s exhibition of new paintings at Sadie Coles HQ is titled family/history, a title intended to capture the duality of content in Sasnal’s intertwined subject matter, activating with equal energy images from life at home and current affairs. Intimate, affectionate portraits of the artist’s interior life and family reappear in his work. But any family history exceeds the comfort of the domestic and sits within a bigger sphere of politics and culture which can shape, expand, disrupt and destabilise. 

Sasnal describes his paintings as ‘cover versions’ of existing pictures. Always referring to the source material – whether gathered from archived memorabilia or photography he captured himself – each painting hints at a secondary image behind the canvas. The relationship to the original image is reductive: colours shift or simplify, elements are removed, and patterns or graphics are exaggerated as painterly gesture. Much like memory itself, which is never truly trustworthy but preserves a sensation of poignant moments, these paintings offer an essence rather than a reality. Alongside a library of his own references, Sasnal revisits subjects after decades of distance or draws from generations before his own, paraphrasing experienced or witnessed encounters into a painted album. 

Distinct genres of subject have emerged in Sasnal’s works. Alongside the family portraits in this exhibition, he returns to music, landscape, history and politics with a fervour. The portraits of musicians expand the autobiographical resonance of his paintings, drawing on the subjective ability of an admired artist to conjure a period, a location, or a feeling. Alongside the intensity of fandom and the scenes of family life are studies of the greyed-out faces of politicians and sites of authority such as the Oval Office. For Sasnal, the dissected, examined past and present are exchangeable and activate each other, articulated through the direct economy of reductive viewpoint, equally semiotic and sentimental.

Responding to both the reality of the images and the historical reality that brought them to life, in family / history Sasnal examines collective memories as exactingly as he observes private encounters. Perhaps in reaction to how the daily dump of momentous imagery from global news is often cushioned by our domestic security, this exhibition registers and witnesses the layered reality of human experience”.

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland) studied architecture at the Krakow University of Technology (1992-1994) followed by painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (1994-1999). I rather like that architecture came first.

Sadie Coles HQ/Savile Row is found at 17 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PN. The gallery is open Tuesday until Saturday, 10am until 6pm. The Wilhelm Sasnal exhibition on until 23rd May 2026

Do we have a fifth thing? Shall we find a fifth thing just for the sake of having five? is there five this week? Maybe we’ll have five next week?