Eliana Willis

Galleries in London are bringing their A-game—and many U.K. debuts for artists—during this year’s Frieze week, which may be the closest return to a sense of pre-pandemic “normalcy” the city has seen yet.
With travel restrictions relaxed in most part of the world, the U.K. capital is expecting an influx of international collectors, curators and artists. Add to that the frisson of competition brought by Paris+, the inaugural edition of the Swiss organizer Art Basel’s new art fair in France, and you have a recipe for some dynamic programming.
Here are the ten shows you should not miss between the art fair-hopping this week, from a tribute to the recently deceased painter Sam Gilliam, to some of the earliest computer-generated art.

“Garret Bradley: Safe”Lisson Gallery, through October 29
Garrett Bradley, Safe (2022), still, single channel video, HD (color, sound), 20 minutes. Photo: © Garrett Bradley. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
“Safe” isn’t just the title of the American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s inaugural show with Lisson Gallery this autumn. It is also the title of her second installment in a trilogy of short films that explores the various dimensions of women’s lives. As a follow-up to AKA (2019), the first installment of the trilogy that examines exterior relationships, Safe (2022) takes a look on the inner life. The work is exhibited in the form of a three-channel video installation, and the film’s score fills all three exhibition spaces across the gallery, creating an immersive experience.
67 Lisson Street, London, NW1 5DA
– Vivienne Chow

“Anne Imhof: Avatar II”Sprüth Magers, through December 23
Installation shot of “Anne Imhof: Avatar II” at Sprüth Magers, London, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
Spanning all four floors of Sprüth Magers London gallery in Mayfair—the first to take up the whole building—this solo show of new works from the famed German artist is one of the must-see gallery shows this season. There are a lot of works on view: oil paintings, large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, drawings, audio-visual works, and conceptual installations. But its is not just about the show’s sheer size and volume. It is the unsettling scenes and narratives carved out by the seemingly oddly placed fitness equipment and gym furniture installed throughout the gallery that make it a unique immersive experience.
7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ
– Vivienne Chow

“Jean-Marie Appriou”Massimo De Carlo, through November 12
Jean-Marie Appriou, The Horse. Courtesy of the artist and Massimo De Carlo.
The solo show of the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou is the inaugural exhibition of Massimo De Carlo’s new London gallery in Mayfair. The space is located on the first floor of a Grade II–listed building dating back to 1723. Appriou, who lives and works in Paris, is known for his surreal sculptures of horses, which graced the entrance to New York’s Central Park for a year. This show, featuring a new body of work, is also the artist’s first solo show in the U.K.
16 Clifford Street, London, W1S 3RG
– Vivienne Chow

“Sam Gilliam: Late Paintings”Pace Gallery, through November 12
Sam Gilliam, Lilly (2022). Photo: © Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pace brings a selection of art created by Sam Gilliam during the last two years of his life, from a suite of monumental paintings to smaller works on paper. The exhibition, which is Gilliam’s debut in the U.K., was conceived together with the artist before his death this June. The showcase of one of the most celebrated figures in post-war American art takes up the entire space of Pace’s gallery at Hanover Square.
5 Hanover Square, London, W1S 1HQ
– Vivienne Chow 

“Michael Armitage: Amongst the Living, with Seyni Awa Camara”White Cube, Bermondsey, through October 30
Michael Armitage, Mother’s Milk (2022). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
From last summer’s acclaimed show at the Royal Academy in London, to the recent exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel coinciding with Art Basel, Michael Armitage has certainly had a great deal of exposure over the past 12 months. At White Cube, the famed artist is sharing the stage with Seyni Awa Camara, a Senegalese artist whose work he has admired over the years. While some of the recent paintings on view at the London gallery were previously shown in Basel, the juxtaposition of these works with a group of Camara’s terracotta sculptures in the gallery’s vast Bermondsey has added another layer of reading to Armitage’s storied practice. This is also the first presentation of Camara’s work in the U.K.
144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3TQ
– Vivienne Chow

“Harold Cohen: The AARON Retrospective”
Gazelli Art House, through November 19
Harold Cohen, AARON with Decorative Panel (1992). Image courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
With all the excitement in recent months about generative and A.I.-generated art, it will surely be a surprise to many that Gazelli is staging the U.K. first-ever solo show dedicated to AARON, British artist Harold Cohen’s computer program that was producing its own artworks from as early as the 1970s until the artist’s death in 2016. Today, the collection of outputted art provides a fascinating insight into the developments of machine learning over several decades, as this retrospective takes us through Cohen’s creative journey.
39 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NN
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Teresita Fernández: Caribbean Cosmos”
Lehmann Maupin, through November 5
Installation view of Teresita Fernández’s solo show “Caribbean Cosmos” at Lehmann Maupin London. Photo: courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.
Teresita Fernández has explored the materiality of the Caribbean’s earthy terrain through a broad range of mixed media, including glazed ceramic, fired clay, copper and a sculpture of solid charcoal. The islands’ breathtaking natural wonders swirl into abstract forms so that even microscopic details can become a magical cosmic expanse. Viewers may be lulled by notions of tropical paradise, but never far away are references to colonial and commercial violence to the land.
1 Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis”
Gagosian Davies Street, through November 12
Tyler Mitchell, Cage (2022). Photo: courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Aged just 23-years-old, Tyler Mitchell had already shot to fame after photographing Beyoncé on the cover of Vogue’s September issue in 2018. With dreamlike, tranquil beauty, his latest body of work, “Chrysalis,” presents Black subjects in settings that are undefined but idyllic—if artificially so. Tension might be introduced by the tyre on a rope, which suspends a boy just above a lake’s surface. Elsewhere, a tightly cropped picket fence could bring to mind conventional suburban safety… or containment. Large-scale works are interspersed with a series of smaller studies of men wading and struggling through mud.
17-19 Davies Street, London, W1K 3DE
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Alice Neel: There’s Still Another I See”
Victoria Miro Gallery II, through November 12
Left: Alice Neel, John with Bowl of Fruit (1949), Right: Alice Neel John (1933). Photo: courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and Victoria Miro.
Famous for her searching portrayals of friends, families and strangers, Alice Neel never had any trouble capturing her subject. For the first time, however, Victoria Miro is bringing together portraits of the same sitter that were in many cases painted several decades apart. Inevitably, these revealing pairings show us how each person has evolved and changed in the eyes of the artist, as well as bringing to light Neel’s own stylistic development. The show includes studies of the gallerist Ellie Poindexter, Neel’s friend John Rothschild, her elder son Richard and her mother.
16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RM
– Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Carolee Schneemann: 1955–1959”
Hales Gallery, through October 29
Installation view of “Carolee Schneemann: 1955–1969,” Hales London, 17 September–29 October 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P.P.O.W, New York.
Just a stone’s throw from radical American artist Carolee Schneemann’s first major U.K. museum survey at the Barbican, Hales Gallery takes us back to her roots by focusing on the four-year period between 1955 and 1959, when Schneemann was just a teenager. Among the works on display is a series of studies of a naked couple embracing from 1957, which was painted only shortly after Schneemann had graduated from her BFA at Bard College; the works bring to light how much Schneemann had been influenced by Abstract Expressionism at the time.
Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA
– Jo Lawson-Tancred
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Munich’s annual Various Others—the southern German city’s answer to a gallery weekend—launched its fifth edition last month. In a slightly unusual partnership, this gallery-weekend-meets-art-festival brings together private galleries and public museums for several weeks of openings and exhibitions.
The art event plays to the strengths of the local art scene, which has a robust institutional landscape, which has blossomed even more in recent years, with new directors at two of its main museums, Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein Munich.
Borrowing from the well-loved Condo format that has taken place in London and New York, Various Others features 19 partner galleries from abroad collaborating with their Munich colleagues. Some were given a carte blanche, like at gallery Beacon, where Société presented a solo display of Trisha Baga’s installation There’s No “I” in Trisha (through October 15).
Sperling, one of the event’s founding galleries, hosted Berlin’s KOW with a two-person show by Anna Ehrenstein and Andrew Gilbert (through October 15), an uncanny union of two artists who each explore power structures in very different ways.
And, not unlike Brussels or Vienna, Munich is steeped in collectors—and some of these patrons opened their doors to the public, with Sammlung Goetz and Pain Caspari hosting viewings.
Here are seven shows not to miss in Munich this month.

Pippa Garner at Kunstverein Munich
On view through November 13
Pippa Garner, Un(tit)led (Women Should Be Free) (No Charge). Courtesy of the artist.
California artist Pippa Garner gets her first solo exhibition at an institution in Europe, a survey of an ephemeral output of work that spans five decades at Kunstverein Munich. Her artistic career began during the Vietnam War, when she worked as a combat artist, documenting and interpreting the historic event. (She was known then as Philip Garner.)
The show “Act Like You Know Me” retraces Garner’s artistic production over the years through photographs (many of her sculptures and artworks were lost, given away, or reused for other projects). It is a tribute to Garner’s unique transgressive methodology of questioning American consumerism, the marketing of lifestyle, as well as gender, identity, and body politics.

Hans-Jörg Mayer and Kenneth Anger at Galerie Christine Mayer
On view through October 15
Kenneth Anger, Astarte (Anaïs Nin) (1954–66) Photo: © Kenneth Anger. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
Together with Sprüth Magers, the Munich gallery Christine Mayer has brought together a dark and amusing combination of two enfant terribles: the German painter Hans-Jörg Mayer and the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger, a few years Mayer’s senior, had an outsized influence on the German artist’s practice. Though working in different media, Anger and Mayer are both self-declared Luciferians who mine this occult religion for their work, and that fascination pulses across this rather eccentric two-artist show. To accompany Mayer’s large, colorful paintings that seem to depict half-transformed human figures are are a trio of printed film stills from his seminal 1954 work Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, focusing on a freakish masquerade scene.

Imi Knoebel at Sammlung Goetz
On view through April 29, 2023
Imi Knoebel, 16 Farben auf Blanc de titane (1993). Photo: Johannes Haslinger. Courtesy of the the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022.
In Germany, the Minimalist painter and sculptor Imi Knoebel needs no introduction—yet an extensive exhibition, like the one at Sammlung Goetz, one of Germany’s most respected private collections, offers a refreshing view into the artist’s career, with museum-quality works and historical considerations. The retrospective, which shirks a chronological succession of work, spans five decades. Organized in collaboration with Knoebel and his wife Carmen, the exhibition features his well-known fiberboard paintings and geometric works made with aluminum, as well as rarely exhibited expressive paintings from the 1980s.

Paula Rego at Jahn und Jahn 
On view through October 15
Paula Rego, Untitled 2 (1999). Photo: © Paula Rego, Courtesy the artist and Cristea Roberts.
An exhibition of Rego’s work carries particular weight this year on the heels of her death in June, at age 87. Yet Rego’s paintings and drawings have a strong gravitas in any context. the show “Fragments of a Language of the Body” bowls you over with two floors of works by the Portuguese artist. (Coincidentally, perhaps, Jahn und Jahn announced this month that it will be opening a space in Lisbon, Rego’s hometown.)
The in paintings, sketches, and drawings on view offer unflinching depictions of difficult subjects and female figures undergoing various life milestones and traumas: suffering, pregnancy, ageing, abuse, abortion. Rego’s skill as an artist is representing such a vast breadth of human emotion from total vulnerability and subjugation to empowerment—even if the latter comes in the simple glance of a subject. Concurrently on view in Venice are several large paintings, given prime place in Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale. It is part of overdue appreciation for an artist of titanic importance in the canon of portraiture.
 
Joan Jonas at Haus der Kunst
On view through February 26, 2023
Joan Jonas during a performance. Photo: Moira Ricci. © Joan Jonas / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022.
The experimental, 94-year-old artist was finally given a long-planned show at the Haus Der Kunst. A major survey of Jonas’s deep and varied artistic practice—which began in the 1960s, when she helped create performance art as we know it today—has a particular poignancy given that it is a postponed project started by the museum’s former director Okwui Enzewor in 2018.
After Enzwor was ousted from the museum, his Jonas show (as well as a show dedicated to Adrian Piper) was called off, citing “cost” concerns. A show of work by Markus Lüpertz, a member of Germany’s near-monarchic male painter cohort, took its place. (Ironically, that show was organized by the curator Walter Smerling, who is known for murky financial dealings with German institutions.)
The Haus Der Kunst’s new artistic director Andrea Lissoni has brilliantly revived this show with his own vision, organizing it into open-ended themes and bodies of work. It is a fascinating way to wander through the work of an absolutely timeless artist.

Gabriel Rico at Max Goelitz
On view through October 15
A detail of Gabriel Rico’s Because Nothing is More Pleasant to the Eye Than Green Grass Kept Finely Short (99 cm) (2022). Photo: Studio Rico, Courtesy of OMR, Mexico City.
One of the newer galleries on the Munich art scene—and, now in Berlin, as well, where the gallery expanded to this month—Max Goelitz hosted a precise exhibition of work by Mexican artist Gabriel Rico, collaborating with one of Mexico City’s more notable galleries, OMR.
Rico, who is also represented by Perrotin, creates entrancing sculptures that are in an almost neurotically created balance, where disparate materials—wood, bones, neon rope, a rusted old horseshoe—are brought into new constellations. Each individual piece of these masterful compositions seem to be caught in a tension between their historical function—a playing card, a piece of a fishing tool—and the connotation derived from being part of a larger work.
To this end, on view at the gallery is a particularly striking piece from 2022—a large-scale, wall-mounted circle made from a ready-made arrangement of 41 different kinds of knives, some new, some old, some antique. The work introduces a tense kind of holy interpretation of society’s most basic tool.

“To Be Seen. Queer Lives 1900–1950” at the NS Documentation Center
On view from October 7 through May 21, 2023
“Transvestites” in front of the entrance to the Institute of Sexology, Berlin 1921. © bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer
“To Be Seen” opens this week at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism—often just called the NSDOKU—an institution that opened in 2015 on the site of former “Brown House,” the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters. NSDOKU examines the history and impact of the Nazi party from the time of its formation to the present day.
The upcoming show will focus on the stories of Germany’s LGBTQI+ community, who suffered greatly under the Nazi regime. It will also focus on how queer life became more present in public life during the 1920s, at a time when progress was being made in the realm of human rights and social freedoms. This progress, however, was snuffed out as the Nazis came to power. The show presents historical archive material alongside contemporary works by artists including Maximiliane Baumgartner, Nicholas Grafia, Henrik Olesen, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Find out more about Various Others’s programming on its website.
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In Los Angeles, the gallery calendar this season is packed with a healthy range of excellent work to see, from conceptual to social realist, from textile-based to figurative. There are two very different takes on studio portrait photography, as well as wide-ranging presentations by or devoted to beloved artists who’ve recently passed, plus a spate of galleries who are new in town (Karma, branching out from New York, and more to come). To get you oriented, Artnet News has compiled our top 10 picks below.

Kaari Upson, “never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life”
Sprüth Magers, through October 15
Kaari Upson, Portrait (Vain German) (2020–21). © The Art Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
Before her untimely death from cancer in 2021, Kaari Upson was a beloved fixture in the art community of Los Angeles and beyond, whose multidisciplinary practice evinced a dark humor and boundless imagination. Sprüth Magers presents her final bodies of work, including Portrait (Vain Germans), ghostly wall-mounted panels of both painting and sculpture that debuted during the most recent Venice Biennale.

Yukie Ishikawa
Blum & Poe, through October 22
Yukie Ishikawa, Impermanence—Domyaku Uruoi Okoru (2022). Photo: Josh Schaedel. Courtesy of Blum & Poe.
Yukie Ishikawa’s distinct style of painting is notable for its pointed deconstruction of Minimalism’s monochromes and tidy, right-angled grids, deploying curved and irregular lines in their place. Blum & Poe presents the latest in the Japanese artist’s “Impermanence” series, an ongoing body painted over previous works, sometimes adding sand to the paint for texture. Based on the ever-changing view outside her Hidaka City studio window, fine-lined grids form the ghostly abstractions of buildings that shape the urban landscape.

Shahryar Nashat, “Happier Than Ever”
David Kordansky Gallery, through October 22, 2022
Shahryar Nashat, Lover_18.JPEG (2022). Photo: Edward Mumford. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.
Nashat makes intriguingly tactile floor- and wall-based sculptures, as well as paintings and video installations. In his second showing with David Kordansky, “Lover.JPEG,” Nashat coolly conveys the at times unsettlingly brutal aspects of love and passion. We see paintings of a cross-section of a chest cavity; skeins of viscous urethane dripping down from the ceiling, as if sweat traveling down a spine; while floor sculptures offer hints of a now-absent bodily form, like the imprint of a paramour’s body in bed.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, “Daylight Studio/Dark Room Studio”
Vielmetter, through October 22 More

Dealers, collectors, and art enthusiasts gathered in Poland last weekend for Warsaw Gallery Weekend which kicked off on September 29, an annual celebration of contemporary art organized by the city’s galleries. For its 11th edition, 33 galleries participated with 38 exhibitions in their gallery spaces and at offsite venues beyond. At the infamous Palace of Culture and Science, Raster Gallery presented the work of Oskar Dawicki and Gunia Nowik presented the work of Nicolas Grospierre in the Pniewski Villa, a modernist architectural gem. At Kino Iluzjon, a 1950s cinema, Hos Gallery and Propaganda Gallery collaborated on an exhibition of sculptor Norbert Delman. 
While the right-wing Law and Justice party continues to wreak havoc on the country’s esteemed contemporary art institutions—most recently ousting the longtime director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź following similar actions at Warsaw’s Zacheta Gallery and the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw—the capital’s private cultural sector is rapidly growing. Artists and curators are finding refuge in commercial galleries where they can present work without fear of censorship. Given this, it is unsurprising that many of the subjects that appeared throughout this year’s weekend were precisely those which the conservative government has been trying to quell, including women’s rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and how history is manipulated by those in power.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine escalates on the heels of Putin’s annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, it was hard not to notice the recurring references to central eastern Europe’s bloody and complicated past. Some galleries provided additional pamphlets translated into Ukrainian, acknowledging the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Poland since the start of the war earlier this year. In many ways, the gallery weekend felt like a safe haven from the current geopolitical reality of the region: a four-day celebration of the creativity and dialogue that can be generated in inclusive spaces. It also served as a reminder of all that may be lost if the right-wing government continues to chip away at Poland’s art and culture scene amid a chaotic political situation in Europe.
Below are five artists with stand-out exhibitions that resonated with the cultural moment.

Błażej Rusin
On view at Olszewski Gallery through October 28
Błażej Rusin at Olszewski Gallery. Courtesy the gallery and the artist. Photo: Małgorzata Starz.
Błażej Rusin creates kaleidoscopic frescos on the walls of abandoned buildings throughout East-Central Europe. Influenced by his origins in the eastern Poland as well the history of the many displaced peoples of this historically multiethnic region, Rusin carefully removes his works—sometimes with bits of plaster—and displays them as mobile wall hangings. At Olszewski Gallery, Rusin’s works are presented alongside the work of 90-year-old artist Wojciech Sadley, an important figure in the Polish School of Textiles from the same region who also painted on easily transportable materials including cloth and parchment. Ranging from €5,000 to €6,000 ($5,000 to $6,000), Rusin’s monumental works, which he describes as “post-graffiti,” are exuberant celebrations of pattern, shape, and color that nod to the medley of cultural influences and diversity of the eastern borderland region of Poland.

Karolina Grzywnowicz
On view at Jednostka Gallery through October 22
Karolina Grzywnowicz at Jednostka Gallery. Courtesy the gallery and the artist. Photo: Jednostka Gallery Archive.
Walking into Jednostka Gallery, the visitor is immediately struck by the smell of pine emanating from of a bundle of sticks suspended in the center of the small gallery. The installation is the work of Karolina Grzywnowicz, who in recent years has focused her research-based practice on how landscaping is used as a tool of ideology and power. In the installation (€12,500 ($12,500)) and collages (€1500—€3000 ($1,500—$3,000)) on view at Jednostka Gallery, Grzywnowicz focuses on the use of two different pine trees: the Scots pine (pinus sylvestris) which was used by Nazi Germans to camouflage the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau, and the Jerusalem pine (pinus halepensis) planted by Zionists in Palestine to make the landscape resemble that of East-Central Europe. Grzywnowicz’s exhibition was awarded one of two prizes given during Warsaw Gallery Weekend by the ING Polish Art Foundation, selected by an international jury of six art professionals.

Karol Radziszewki
On view at BWA Warszawa through November 26
Karol Radziszewski at BWA Warszawa. Photo: Aga Sablinska.
With his newest body of work, Karol Radziszewki (born 1980) continues his mission of highlighting just how many historic Polish cultural figures were non-heteronormative, a fact that is ignored and, at times, even erased by the right-wing government and conservative portions of the Polish population. In this series on view at BWA, Radziszewski focuses on the composer Karol Szymanowski, considering the musician’s lovers and characters from his operas and ballets. The paintings, which range in price from €1,800 to €10,000 ($1,800 to $10,000), were almost all sold out on the third day of the gallery weekend.
Radziszewski, whose ongoing research project The Queer Archives Institute documents the queer history of East-Central Europe, will be featured in the upcoming exhibition “To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900-1950” at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism in Munich, Germany, which opens this week. His exhibition at BWA Warszawa was awarded the second prize given by the ING Polish Art Foundation.

Patryk Różycki
On view at Polana Institute through October 8
Patryk Różycki at Polana Institute. Photo: Aga Sablinska.
The autobiographical paintings of Patryk Różycki are striking in their intimacy, tackling uncomfortable subjects from his childhood including the difficulty of becoming close to his father and the inability of his family to openly grieve together following the death of his siblings. Różycki, who comes from a rural working class background, at times also addresses what can be seen as the elephant in the room of an otherwise inclusionary art weekend: how the Polish art world can be far from welcoming to those from outside of its cosmopolitan centers. Accompanying the exhibition is a diary of sorts, offering Różycki’s very personal reflections on each of the scenes he depicts in his paintings, which range from €1,800 to €4,400 ($1,800 to $4,400). 

Elka Krajewska (& KrajM)
On view at lokal_30 through December 2
Elka Krajewska at lokal_30. Courtesy the gallery and the artists. Photo: lokal_30.
Over the past two decades, Elka Krajewska collaborated on various art projects with her late mother Maria (who goes by the artistic name KrajM) during the latter’s struggle with the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Grappling with the loss of her mother’s ability to speak, Krajewska searched for new methods to communicate with her—together, they found a creative collaboration.
The exhibition features drawings and installations the two completed together as well as Dromoi Pros Matria, a new documentary video-collage featuring various snippets from the lives of both artists, including scenes in which they are creating some of the works on view at lokal_30. The exhibition is at times unsettling in its exposure of moments that are usually kept private, and raises the question of what can be gained through pulling the curtain far back on the process of losing loved ones.
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Twinning is in. From Gucci’s “Twinsburg” collection that just had 68 doubles walking the runway in Milan, to the white-hot market for Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s twin figures, to the obsession with the eerie doppelgänger DNA uncovered by testing the twin stranger subjects found by Canadian photographer François Brunelle, it feels like doubles are everywhere.
So it is at Sid Motion Gallery in London, where eight artists have responded to a prompt to execute the same idea twice, and the two resulting versions of the show, “Same Same,” are hung in adjoining rooms.
Curated by gallery founder Sid Motion and artist and curator Rose Davey, the idea for the  group show stemmed from a lecture Davey gave at the Slade School of Fine Art in London on the art of repetitive making. Davey was inspired by a 17th-century double portrait of a pair of elaborately clothed women, The Cholmondeley Ladies, who appear to be identical at first glance, but on closer viewing are revealed to have many subtle differences. The works on view in the exhibition are also doubles, but instead of appearing identical, they all look quite different—but stemmed from an identical concept.
Installation view, “Same Same,” Sid Motion Gallery. Photo: courtesy of Tim Bowditch.
Of the 17th-century image that inspired the show, Rose Davey wrote in her exhibition text that “it is an immediately arresting image that illustrates how repetition can warrant a work iconic.” On the other hand, “the strategy of [making work] again is not always considered a positive move. Making something multiple times can be viewed as capitalizing on one’s success” and “an artist labeled as ‘successful’ can often be accused of cultivating a production line to meet demand.”
In the group show, artists are asked to return to the concept that inspired an earlier work and make it again—in a sort of collaboration with their past selves. Highlights of the exhibition include a pair of dark and mysterious works that dance between figuration and abstraction by recent Slade graduate Remi Ajani, and star artist Rose Wylie’s remixed polaroid camera.
Installation view, “Same Same,” Sid Motion Gallery. Photo: courtesy of Tim Bowditch.
The other artists who responded to the exhibition’s prompt are Gabriele Beveridge, Rose Davey, Mary Ramsden, Genevieve Stevens, Tessa Whitehead, and Gary Woodley. 
“Arguably, all artists attempt the same thing again and again; a continuous quest for visual solutions born from restless curiosity,” Motion and Davey said in a statement. “‘Same Same’ aims to highlight the productivity of process, since it is the artist’s failure to reach an enduring conclusion that keeps them making.”
“Same Same” is on view through October 22 at Sid Motion Gallery, London. 
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