Forget the packed museums: we've rounded up the small London galleries with shows to pop in to summer
Yayoi Kusama exhibition smaller london galleries
Whether you like music or nature, Old Masters or new nudity, we've found the best smaller London exhibitions this summer that will draw you away from the crowds and down the backstreets of some strange minds. Get lost in art with these hidden gems.
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It's London, in the Blitz-ravaged East End, and a man with a camera is wedging a model up the side of a building in a rickety industrial wasteland. The East-ender is photographer Terence Donavan - a key figure of London's Swinging Sixties scene, and the subject of a major new photography exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery.
Emerging from the wreckage of the World War II, his noir, technical genius helped launch the careers of legends such as Twiggy, shooting for publications such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as his making his own gritty work. Come and discover his iconic, iconoclastic work this summer.
Young black men have always been trendsetters. Whether in fashion in or music, New York, London or Sowety, they have long shaped their self image on front of the camera. Unfortunately, as recent headlines attest, influence and visibility doesn't secure safety. At a moment when the #BlackLivesMatter campaign is, sadly, more relevant than ever, this timely Photographer's Gallery show explores black identity through the figure of the black dandy, as with images from the early 20th century, through 60s and 70s up to the present day.
The dandy is flamboyant, provocative, camp, playful and domineering. Jettisoning cliches of slacks and hoodies, this style of dress is It is about confounding expectations about how black men should look or carry themselves. We can't wait to get to know them better.
All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016 Installation, Yayoi Kusama 25 May – 30 July 2016 Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW Beloved Japanesse artist Yayoi Kusama, now well into her ninth decade, has brought three ‘Infinity Rooms’ to Islington; mirrored convex chambers, each with some flickering light source. When you step into the room alone, and the door is closed behind you, everything is suddenly infinite. You are suspended in a kaleidoscopic cosmos. Dimension upon dimension tumble about your feet; the effect is thrilling. (It also, crucially, has enormous selfie-potential. Instagrammers are sure to flock here in droves.)
No, these aren't the products of acid-addled '60s psychedelia. They're Victorian, actually. And they're drawn by ghosts.
Georgiana Houghton was at the forefront of the Victorian Spiritualist movement, making hundreds of abstract automatic watercolours in the 1860s and 70s. They are spectacular - eerie, but rippling with strange life. They also have a good claim to being the first ever abstract works. Largely ignored and ridiculed in her lifetime, she's finally getting the attention she deserves. Weird, wonderful, strangely addictive.
Turner Prize nominee Cornelia Parker. Parker has invited over sixty of the biggest names in art, including Laure Prouvost, David Shrigley, Edmund de Waal, Mona Hatoum, Laure Prouvost, Bob and Roberta Smith, Antony Gormley, to contribute a piece of work, or an object they have found and kept.
Look above, for example. British artist John Smith walked into his father’s shed, just after his death. There he found a stick, which, for half a century, was used to by his Dad to mix household paint. He sawed it in half, and the cross section revealed every room his father had ever painted: colour upon colour, like the rings of a tree. A whole history, in less than an inch.
Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Rafael Ortega, Alejandro Morales, and Félix Blume, Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream Ciudad Juárez, México, 2013 Francis Alys london show
Belgium-born, Mexico based performance artist Francis Alÿs returns to London, following a major, highly acclaimed Tate exhibition five years ago.
The artist deals poetically with places that have been uprooted politically, by means of public action - installations, videos, paintings and drawings. A new David Zwirner exhibition which opened this June presents recent works made in Ciudad Juárez, which sits opposite El Paso on the Tex-Mex border. Once a prosperous border city, in recent years Ciudad Juárez has been devastated by drug-related narco-violence.
Icelandic installation artist Ragnar Kjartansson presents a series of moving and immersive installation artworks that focus on repetition and music. Yes he sings naked in a bath, but he's supported by members of Sigur Ros and a hauntingly melodic refrain. In another film, you can watch his mother spit on him. And then there are the minstrels playing live music through the galleries. One of the worlds most important installation artists, Iceland's victorious once more.
When we think of abstract art, we think of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. But this White Cube exhibition looks at the language of chinese abstraction that developed indepently of its Western counterpart, through diverse influences including traditional calligraphic aesthetics, Taoist philosophy as well as a challenge to the government-Sanctioned painting promoted during the Cultural Revolution. Nine artists contribute to this exhibition, which brings to the fore dialogues and relationships that are seldom heard.
Neo Naturists Studio Voltaire, Clapham High Street 8 July - 28 August
Whilst the New Romantic movement had performers and clubbers confined to their dressing rooms carefully applying make up, the Neo Naturists barraged onto the London club scene with their live body-painting, carefree attitude and gloriously irreverent manifesto. Take a sneak peak into their world in this free exhibition at Studio Voltaire with archive video and art. It takes 'carefree' to a new level.
Westminster Hall is the seat of parliament and all it's fantastically terrible mistakes. Artist, restorer and architect Jorge Otero-Palios has teamed up with Artangel to hang a 50-metre swathe of latex from the hammerbeam roof down to the floor: it's big, its yellow, it's eerily lit.
What's it all for? The latex was originally used in restoration: pressed into the East side of the building and lifted away to clean the thousand year old surface of smears and grime and dust. You can see where the bricks have pressed in the rubber... but it's really the grime brought to light that will leave an impression. Free to visit and impressive to behold, the exhibition brings to mind dirty politics more than dirty walls.
Derlon Almeida, Image courtesy of the Horniman Museum
In the build up to the Rio Olympics the excellent Horniman Museum is having it's own Brazilian festival. Celebrating all things Brazilian, the street art caught our eye provides a great excuse for our favourite activities- street wandering and treasure hunting. The street art of Brazil is legendary for elevating the form to gallery status long before Banksy.
We love Ananda Nahu and her celebration of African Women, which has included a massive, flower-bombed Angela Davis, whilst Derlon Almeida brings Brazilian traditional motifs bang up to date. Five big pieces to find: one fine summer stroll.
Ahead of their major Gormley exhibition, pop in to White Cube Bermondsey and see Calcutta-born contemporary artist Shaw who has inserted his portrait somewhere in each of the richly detailed landscapes of his highly odd, highly coloured paintings. Using the traditional technique of porcupine quills to apply enamel onto wooden panels, Shaw draws on myth from Eastern and Western art, as well as the composition of old masters, to create his worlds. Strange and beautiful.
Comic-book influences and huge canvases make for a funny if unsettling exhibition by the Armenian-born Eloyan. Large-scale paintings and accompanying bronzes assemble a cast of pop culture and imagined beings, such as Man Dressed as a Wolf (2007) and new pieces from a series called Daily Strips which shows cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, starring in grotesquely large, wobbly newspaper headlines. Newsworthy. FIND OUT MORE Colour and Vision Natural History Museum, South Kensington 15 July - 6 November
Image courtesy Natural History Museum
For kids, not strictly art, but the chromatic co-ordination in this exhibition will inspire every colourist. Experience iridescence, light, spectra and life seen through the eyes of a dragonfly. Why is blue so rare in nature? What colour are peacock frogs? Let nature paint you a picture of our world in this interactive and immersive exhibition.
