Emalin, 1 Holywell Lane, London EC2A 3ET and 118½ Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6JN emalin.co.uk Instagram: @emalinofficial
Emalin was founded – as a pop-up in 2014, then in Shoreditch from 2016 – by two recent graduates with international backgrounds: Switzerland, Austria and Italy for Leopold Thun; Germany for Angelina Volk. The gallery has a comparably wide-ranging outlook, but has stayed in Shoreditch, albeit moving around a little and expanding into a second space recently. Rather than six shows annually in one location, the plan is now for four shows in each of two distinctively-named spaces: the light-filled first floor of The Lazarus Building at the southern end of the High Street; and the historic Clerk’s House attached to St Leonards Church at the northern end, an 18th-century Grade II-listed building on two levels known as ‘118½ Shoreditch High Street’. Both locations are well worth visiting currently: for Judith Bernstein’s maximalist word and phallic screw drawings at the former, and an extraordinary number and variety of sculptures by Adriano Costa at the latter.
Shows tend towards visually impactful installations, typically with broadly political concerns – issues of the environment, gender, justice etc. Emalin is where I first saw a solo show by Alvaro Barrington, a recent market darling and Tate star who has since adopted an unusually pluralist approach to representation. Other memorable exhibitions have included three by Kembra Pfahler, the cult New York underground figure who, in 1990, founded the death-rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black; Lithuanian Augustas Serapinas’ installation of snowmen; and ‘The Smurfette’, featuring Athena Papadopoulos’ riotously idiosyncratic coat-stand versions of female smurfs.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
