Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, St James's, New Cross, London SE14 6AD

Sophie Barber: The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung

Sophie Barber’s canvases drape tentatively across the floor at Goldsmith’s Centre for Contemporary Art. Repurposed from old paintings and materials within her studio in Hastings, Barber’s works suggest child-like fortresses or half-completed patchwork quilts, laid bare for inspection. With its excitable superlatives and hyperbole, ‘The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung’ invites its viewer to group these works together as a foray into the faux-naif style. Review by Olivia Fletcher

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Arusha Art Gallery, 13A Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6QG

Ancient Deities

In September, Arusha Gallery reopened its doors to a world transformed. ‘Ancient Deities’ fittingly extends the viewer an invitation to consider our future by returning our attentions to the myths of days gone by. Co-curated by artist Rhiannon Salisbury, the show depicts a pantheon for the contemporary. 18 artists were invited to respond to a god of the past, reinventing them for a modern audience. Review by Hailey Maxwell

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Modern Art, 7 Bury Street, St. James's, London SW1Y 6AL

Martha Jungwirth

Martha Jungwirth is an artist you feel you may have seen before. A sense of déjà vu pervades her exuberant works, slashed and smeared in paint. With all the ferocity of a Willem de Kooning and the poetic subtlety of a Joan Mitchell, Jungwirth’s paintings sit comfortably amongst her Abstract Expressionist forebears, even while they mutter disobediently. Review by Claire Phillips

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Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

Gary Simmons: Screaming into the Ether

Gary Simmons is a Los Angeles based artist with New York roots. On view at Metro Pictures, New York is ‘Screaming into the Ether’ consisting of a collection of paintings that expands Simmons’ examination into cultural nuances. ‘Screaming into the Ether’ confronts the propagation of racial stereotypes which continue to frame the world. Review by Sheena Carrington

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Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DG

Gabriella Boyd: For Days

The works have largely one-word titles, and have the ability to describe something large and boundaryless: ‘Stream’, ‘Flood’, ‘Bad Decisions’, ‘Constellation‘; and in other instances specific anatomical objects of focus – ‘Retina’; ‘Tract’, ‘Spit’. The decision to title in this way leaves the viewer with a tight entry point, that either hones into a specific event or zooms out to a dynamic that goes beyond the capacities of the frame. Review by Alice Gale-Feeny

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Platform Southwark, 1 Joan St, South Bank, London SE1 8BS

GLF at 50: The Art of Protest

In 1970, a group of students started weekly meetings at the London School of Economics; they called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, education, the age of consent and in being treated as mentally unwell. Celebrating 50 years of activism, radical protest and positive queerness ‘GLF at 50: The Art of Protest’ at Platform Southwark is part of a sprinkling of events marking half a century of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and their core assertion that ‘Gay is Good’. Their manifesto (republished for this exhibition) was a seminal clarion call for equality. Review by Ian Giles

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Interview with Henry Hudson

The British-American artist Henry Hudson is known for his ‘Jungles': a colourful collection of plasticine works that have been exhibited around the world. And while he has an upcoming exhibition in India showcasing exactly that, he’s also venturing outside of his comfort zone. Recently, he has been exploring other mediums; ceramics, oil and iPad paintings, some of which will be on display at another exhibition in Vienna this fall. I joined Hudson at his East London studio to discuss what he’s been up to during lockdown and the pandemic-inspired works that are currently in progress. Interview by Shelby Wilder

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PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, 451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street Montréal (Quebec) H2Y 2R5, Canada

RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting

In addressing the diaspora, it is a mistake to think national and cultural identity can be rendered in any fixed format marked by an artist’s displacement from one place to another, as if the experience of a second generation immigrant who only knows of their native culture could be compared to someone who is forcefully removed from their place of origin. Review by Elaine Y.J Zheng

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Josh Lilley, 40 - 46 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EX

Tom Anholt: Notes on Everything

Anholt is as much a raconteur as a painter. There are not many contemporary artists, or writers for that matter, who can set a scene better. Figures plucked from his reverie traipse across the canvas in technicolour pyjamas like lost sleepwalkers in scenery that resembles a psychedelic underworld. Review by Ted Targett

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Camden Art Centre, Arkwright Rd, London NW3 6DG

The Botanical Mind Online

‘The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree’ was originally intended to be an in-house group exhibition at Camden Art Centre. Instead, the spread of COVID-19 and the closure of public gallery spaces saw the show move to the digital realm and become ‘The Botanical Mind Online’. The exhibition is hosted at botanicalmind.online, which serves as both the main space to read about the themes and topics of the show, and the central repository for a number of digital offerings, from videos, sound recordings, and podcasts to texts. Review by Aidan Kelly Murphy

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The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, London WC2N 5DN

Backlit: On Visiting The National Gallery, London from Home

Since the lockdown announcement on the 23rd March, galleries and museums across the UK have been emphasising the scope and availability of their digital collections, encouraging the public to engage with high-resolution reproductions of their artefacts online. Considering the work of art in the age of digital reproduction may not be a new phenomenon. And yet, the enthusiasm with which many institutions have been vocalising the accessibility of their archives on the Internet raises the volume on several important questions regarding the significance, if any, of the artwork as a physical, encounterable object, and the responsibility of museums to ensure that their collections are available online. Review by Rowland Bagnall

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Bortolami, 39 Walker St, New York, NY 10013, United States

Rebecca Morris

Every few years or so, the death knell of painting is sounded. Critics, artists and gallerists proclaim that the time of painting, is over. But for Rebecca Morris, the Los-Angeles based artist known for her ambitious abstractions, painting continues to surprise. “Abstraction never left, motherfuckers,” Morris proclaimed in her manifesto, written in 2006: “Don’t pretend you don’t work hard… Be out for blood….” Review by Claire Phillips

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De La Warr Pavilion, Marina, Bexhill On Sea, East Sussex TN40 1DP

Zadie Xa: Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation

By exploring aspects of a mythologised Korean entity - represented by the shamanic Magohalmi grandmother figure - Zadie Xa’s practice poses timely questions of the position of the diasporic artist identity and theories of hybridity during a period of debates on national allegiance and community identification. The coastal natural light and gleaming streamline modern architecture of the De la Warr Pavilion show this sumptuous installation of Zadie Xa’s costumes and paintings to their best. Review by Piers Masterson

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Keelin Montzingo: The Isolated Cut Out

Today as the boundaries between the personal and public are so murky, sousveillance is both a form of protection and an act of surrendering personal identity to corporate data banks. The act itself caught between an effort to control and shape one’s image and a helpless compulsion to either hand over aspects of private life or deliver an expected idea of self to an imagined audience. Keelin Montzingo’s paintings reflect on this grey area, neither criticising nor celebrating but rather trying to decode the way we have turned the camera on ourselves and use digital space to reclaim ownership of the female form and redefine the gaze. Referencing 20th Century male painters, Montzingo uses the image of the cutout female nude, weaving compositions of layered bodies which appear in nondescript digital spaces. Figures float over pixelated backgrounds, washes of colour and digital glitch in a non-physical realm of disruption and static. Text by Gabriella Sonabend

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