I guess we should get back to it, this listing five art things thing, there was a time when I would argue there was no such thing as seasons in the art world, well not in London anyway, it never seemed to stop, it doesn’t feel like that any more though. We are hopefully through the Summer lull now and hopefully the so called art season is ready to kick off again here in the capital city although as galleries get lazier and lazier (or do they just think they’re been cool and down with the kidz?) and not bothering to list things anywhere or to send out press release or communicate in any way other that a story that no one gets to see on Instabloodygram where we’re all at the mercy of the algobloodyrhythms. The London Art Scene really is a little too cool for school right now, especially the new breed of curators and gatekeepers, “we don’t list things, the wrong people will come, we don’t want that” said one East London gallery recently, I haven’t bothered going back since, I assume we’re the wrong sort of people…
We don’t really need an editorial here do we? Another week, another Five Art Things thing and on with all this endless art coverage? Years of it. Actually this week we probably do need an editorial, or a repeat…
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: Play Free: Art Car Boot Fair 2026 at Lewis Cubitt Square, Kings Cross, London – Midday until 6pm, Saturday 5th September – We make absolutely no apology for featuring this at the top of the list of five this week, yes I am taking part, taking part or not, it is by far the most exciting thing happening in terms of the London Art Scene this week, it happens once a year, for something like 21 years now, it always a highlight on the London art year, it is always a party, an event and a lot lot more than just another art fair. There’s a lot more to the Art Car Boot Fair then just a bunch of artists (around one hundred invited artists this year) selling their art directly to you (at car boot fair prices rather than gallery prices), there’s performance, music, outdoor bars, lots of people watching, it really is an art party, a rather defiant artist-led one these days and we desperately need a bit of defiance in these art-by-the-book times of 2026.
The Art Car Boot Fair 2026 is found outdoors at Lewis Cubitt Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4BY. The Fair opens at Midday and runs until 6pm – You do have to pay to get enter this one, a £10 ticket gets you in at the start, a £5 ticket gets you in after 3pm and the event is free to enter after 5pm for the last hour. Art Car Boot Fair / Tickets
Previously on these pages…. The countdown to this year’s fair started on these pages thirty days ago:
Previously
2: Catherine Murphy, Recent Work at Sadie Cole HQ – open now and on until to 7th Nov 2026 – “Catherine Murphy presents recent works in her second solo London exhibition, transforming everyday objects and domestic scenes into intricate, psychologically charged paintings”. I don’t really go for realism, the work of Catherine Murphy does seem to have a lot to say though, here’s what the gallery has to say about it all…
“This September, Sadie Coles HQ, Bury Street, presents recent works by Catherine Murphy (b. 1946, Cambridge, MA), marking the artist’s second solo exhibition in London. Since the 1970s, Murphy has transformed the quotidian into the extraordinary, with painted views of existing and imagined scenarios staged in and around the artist’s home and studio in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Although Murphy’s meticulous commitment to realism once situated her within the tradition of still life, over the past two decades her practice has shifted from direct observation towards more psychologically charged and subtly surreal interpretations of the objects that populate her surroundings. Focusing on overlooked and unexpected viewpoints, Murphy reframes and resizes the familiar. Idiosyncratic glimpses of objects are reproduced to unsettling effect, their character transformed through a careful choreographing of scenes and use of partial, cropped compositions, and heightened colour.
Murphy considers the minutia and the very atoms of her environment. With an unhurried calmness to her approach, the chequered folds of a lightly crumpled shirt, the iridescent drum of a tumble dryer, or footprints in snow glimpsed through smudged glass become intricate galaxies. Her acute scrutiny and recording of the precise and accurate qualities of light causes form and space to shift and change, so that these are no longer simply clothes or forgotten items. Murphy’s sustained attention to crevices and recesses, alcoves and corners, subverts conventional hierarchies of aesthetic value and are imbued with curiosity.
Catherine Murphy (b.1946, Cambridge, MA) studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1966, following which she obtained a BFA at the Pratt Institute, New York in 1967. The artist has remained an influential teacher. For twenty-two years, she served as Senior Critic at Yale University Graduate School of Art. Murphy has exhibited at institutions throughout the United States, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and her work is held in numerous public collections including those of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Murphy lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Sadie Cole HQ is found at 8 Bury Street, London SW1Y. The gallery is open Tuesday through to Saturday, 11am until 6pm. Recent Work is open now and on until to 7th Nov 2026.
3: Chorus at Rhodes Contemporary Art – This one has already opened and runs until 26th September, for those who like so called private views (they hardy ever turn out to be private) there is a late night opening on 10th September, 6pm until 8pm (personally I enjoy viewing art without all the people annoyingly standing in the way of the art talking loudly). “Chorus, unites six contemporary painters whose works join to explore representations of the body and its role in art of the 21th century”.
It is the work of Eleanor Johnson that has us interested in this six artist show – Today’s Slice Of Art (Part 9) – Today a painting called Cornucopia and an artist by the name of Eleanor Johnson, a British painter whose works “explore the body as a site of transformation, instability and continual revision”…
“With themes of transience, overwhelm, anonymity, and humour, Chorus highlights the complexities of body imagery and the modern human experience. With images ranging from repeated orderly forms, to sprawling bodies, or singular figures enduring the isolating nature of the digital age, Chorus works to unveil the nuances of form and feeling in contemporary life through figurative imagery. Rooted in art history’s enduring engagement with the human form, Chorus reflects on the artists’ relationships with the body, both as a singular and collective entity. Challenging the conventions of portraiture, much of Chorus reaches beyond the individual, offering universal and anonymised imagery of the body to serve as a unified image to resonate with all. Here, humankind is unveiled to be inherently social and cumulatively minded, rendering the intrinsically harmonious nature of the body – an integral facet of humanity.
These themes are diversely explored across the six artists who create Chorus: Eleanor Johnson, Jack Penny, Julia Moon, Marina Priyomova, Yoora Lee and Ewa Czwartos.
Through an emphasis of movement and the instability of the mind, Eleanor Johnson’s sprawling figures and fluid brushstrokes set the tone for the exhibition and its desire to understand the complexities of the human experience in imagery of the body. With an emphasis on uniformity, Ewa Cwartos’ nuanced approach to imagining the body as a collective image, revisits historical portraiture, creating large-scale paintings of repeated forms through adopting the visual language of the period. Chaos and hedonism of the modern-day working man is celebrated in the art of Jack Penny, where his farcical representations of the expressive waiters are shown to find humour in the seriousness of city life. The perception the body through the lens of the digital age is explored by Yoora Lee, where her work adopts motifs of distortion to nod towards the fragility of memory and its impact on our understanding of form and figure. The anonymous body is examined in Marina Priyomova’s faceless renderings of group portraits, where her layered approach to painting nods towards the inevitable erasure of memory, as individuals become mere figures as their identities fade over time. Finally, Julia Moon’s work celebrates the transient, fleeting nature of the body in modern life, where the boundaries between figure, object, and space dissolve in her blurred images of the nude body.
Together, the artists in Chorus interrogate the complexities of figuration, understanding the body as something shaped through memory, history, visual culture and societal pressure. This exhibition gives voice to the artists’ unique perspectives on how the body is perceived in the experience of contemporary human life”.
Rhodes Contemporary Art is found at 65 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7LW. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am until 6pm (midday on Saturday). Chorus runs runs until 26th September.
4: Sara Birns, Scene XIX: Corn Maze at Matt Carey-Williams – Another show that has just open, this one is running until 25th Sept 2026, it looks rather intriguing and curiosity never killed the cat; “Matt Carey-Williams is delighted to present Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze, the artist’s second solo presentation at his space at Porchester Place…”
“Drawing on memories of California County Fairs, Birns explores the complex emotional dynamics that emerge within groups – moments of connection, obligation, self-consciousness and joy. Inspired by the artist’s annual trip to the Santa Cruz County Fair in the early 2000s, the works capture the heightened atmosphere of communal gatherings, where forced smiles, fleeting glances and shared experiences reveal how we define ourselves through others”.
Matt Carey-Williams Gallery is found at 12 Porchester Place, London, W2 2BS. The space is open Tuesday to Friday, 10am until 6pm. Corn Maze runs until 25th Sept 2026.
5: Liberté Toujours with Martha Parsey, Pascal Rousson and Cedric Christie at Union Gallery – 4th until 22nd September 2026 – Cederic Christie is always interesting 9as we have said a number of times on these fractured pages) Let’s see if this one walks it as much as it talks it in the small East London white cube, it is a rather intriguing statement from Martha Parsey, There is a Friday night opening, 6pm until 8pm, 4th September
“When Malevich hung his black square in the Suprematist exhibition in 1915 and created Modernism, did he consider himself a modernist? Why did he hang his painting where Russian families would hang their icons? Did that put him closer to an orthodox God or was it just a declaration of the supremacy of pure artistic feeling? When Cezanne broke up the Provence landscape into cubes that would create Cubism and later make Picasso move closer to the Montagne Sainte Victoire to be buried there, did he know the greatest artist of the 20th century would want to lie in his wake at the foothills of his modest landscapes? When Mondrian moved to New York at the end of his life and perceived the complex vibrant city as a square of geometric shapes, did he know that New York would become the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism? We don’t have any answers to these questions. But we think about them. We think about what a modern artist is, what is modern art today. And like in the Socratic Method, the questions go on.
Did Delacroix know that he would create an image of the struggle for freedom, a personification of liberty that would be a political and feminist symbol centuries after he painted it? Did Muhammed Ali (Aka Cassius Clay) know that he was a poet, writing with boxing gloves and evangelical eloquence by resisting the biggest aggression of his time; the Vietnam War? Did Michelangelo know when he made sublimely aesthetic depictions of white flesh and masculinity as marble slaves, that slavery would be abolished and homosexuality decriminalized centuries after his lifetime? Did Manet know after being excluded from the Paris Salon of 1863 that by bridging Realism and Impressionism he would be seen as the father of Modern Art, shattering centuries old rules of Western picture-making? Questions questions, questions. As Euripides said ‘Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing’. Take Courage”. Martha Parsey. August 2026.
Union Gallery is found at 94 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 6PU. The gallery is open midday until 6pm, Thursday to Saturday.
Previously…
Previously at Union
Some Cedric Christie….
THE ORGAN 